Crime and Policing Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness O'Loan

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, is she aware that there are no telemedicine abortifacients available in Northern Ireland? It is not lawful.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I wanted to sound really definitive in saying that I oppose Amendment 424 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, which would remove Clause 208, and that I oppose Amendments 425 and 426D. However, the good thing about this place is that I listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich—about whom I am going to say something wonderful. She made me pause and think, and that is what is really useful about this debate. I am absolutely certain on some things, but I am not quite sure about the tangle of amendments that have been proposed. I am therefore going to carry on and voice some of my concerns.

To give a bit of context, abortion in the UK is a safe, normal and common procedure. It is appreciated by women because, when facing an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, it allows them a legal choice on whether to be a mother—a decision that will alter the whole course of their life. The fact that a third of women in the UK will have a legal and safe abortion at some point in their life—the vast majority of which will happen early on—shows how careful we have to be not to allow this rather fraught, heated and emotional debate impose any unintended barriers to that success story for women’s freedom and rights. I am afraid that some of the well-meaning compromises we have heard about tonight would likely do that. I am particularly worried about undermining telemedicine and pills by post.

I want to reflect on time limits. Many of us will have received a tsunami of emails and letters urging us to oppose Clause 208, stressing emotively—and factually inaccurately—that this clause will legalise abortion until birth, and that that amounts to the state-sanctioned killing of babies, as someone explained to me. We have to restate for the public that this clause does not change the limits for abortion. There is still a 24-week abortion time limit. In fact, abortion itself remains a crime, just as it has been since 1968, unless very stringent conditions are met. I stress again that any medical professional, or anyone else, who assists a woman to get an abortion beyond the legal limit of 24 weeks will be committing a serious crime and will be liable for prosecution.

We have to understand the public backlash, because there is unease about the whole issue of abortion until birth, and time limits per se. As a society, or indeed as a Parliament, we may want to revisit the issue at some stage. For many, the 24-week legal time limit based on viability can feel too arbitrary, especially as surely we all want medical science to make great strides in keeping prematurely born babies alive ever earlier for those women who want their children, but that should not limit the rights of those women who do not want to proceed with their pregnancy.

There are moral issues here about human life—that old chestnut of whether human life starts at conception or birth. There are those who stress that we should focus on the unborn child—we have heard a fair amount of that tonight. They say that, when we talk about more developed foetuses, we are talking about an unborn child, and that the heart that can be seen beating on an ultrasound scan at six weeks is just as much that of an unborn child as one that beats five months later. Is gestational growth a useful guide to the law? Is viability the best guide to what makes us human?

Such difficult discussions should not be shied away from. When you go out and talk to the public about this subject, they talk about time limits and these kinds of issues. Certainly, at the Academy of Ideas, where we work with young people, we consider it is our duty to organise such debates regularly to ensure that new generations rightly ask questions and hear all sides of the argument.

However, Clause 208 is not trying to relitigate the legal time limit debate, even though I welcome the fuller debate we have had tonight. It is important that we acknowledge why it has caused a furore. It removes the threat of criminalisation for a tiny number of women who, for whatever reason, have taken abortion pills to terminate their own pregnancy, but we have to be honest and acknowledge that it brings a risk of abuse—I know that, even though I am supporting it. The notion that decriminalisation will mean that women will gleefully go on a crime spree because it is decriminalised—suggesting that it is only the threat of prosecution that stops women from letting their pregnancies progress carelessly so they can inflict on themselves the horror of self-induced full-term termination —seems far-fetched and lacking in generosity. Legal late abortions are not harmful per se; certainly, they are not more harmful than coercing an unwilling woman to endure a full-time pregnancy and labour against her will.

However, it is also true that late abortions are undoubtedly gruelling for both patient and clinician, which is why the idea that any woman would choose that as an easy or casual option is far-fetched, ludicrous and insulting. The earlier an abortion can be performed, the better it is for women, and that is the reality of the perspective we need for this debate. In 2022, the last year for which figures are available, almost a quarter of a million women in England and Wales had abortions. Almost 90% of those were under 10 weeks and only 1% were at 20 weeks or over. We are not talking about everybody having late abortions or queuing up to have them.

The emergence of telemedicine has allowed access to even earlier abortion. Surely one of the few positives that emerged out of Covid, 2020 and the lockdown was that it changed the abortion regulations to allow medication in early pregnancy to be taken at home. While it is easier, early medical abortion is certainly not a free-for-all or unregulated—it is not like getting a pharmacist to okay your access to Wegovy or Ozempic. It remains regulated under the 1967 Act, which is a hyper-regulated piece of legislation that includes speaking to a doctor and so on. The limit remains at 10 weeks and nothing in Clause 208 changes that. What is positive about pills by post is that it cuts down on the dreaded waiting list times, which means that treatment can be earlier. An insistence on face-to-face appointments, as some of the amendments suggest, would tangle up early abortions in delay, which would undermine the success of 40% of abortions by telemedical methods now being performed at six weeks, versus 25% using traditional access methods.

Finally, one of the arguments used against telemedicine is that it could lead to non-consensual coerced abortions, with abusive men, or even abusive parents, forcing young, vulnerable women to abort. I was glad to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Neate, about the issue in relation to domestic abuse. Clause 208 does not change the law on this non-consensual coerced abortion. Non-consensual coerced abortion at any gestation remains illegal and is a crime.

However, it is key to note that since telemedicine became legal there has been a major increase in safeguarding disclosures, especially by young women who have felt able to talk about being victims of domestic abuse or sexual violence precisely because they are doing it remotely. It has allowed abortion providers to offer invaluable pastoral intervention beyond abortion services. Telemedicine also enables those vulnerable to coercion to avoid their abusers being involved in the deliberations about their desperate plight of being pregnant.

I will just finish by addressing the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. There are many young girls—I appreciate that they are children—from traditional religious communities. Think of the young Catholic girl, the young Muslim girl and so on, as well as those at risk of honour-based violence. Those kinds of young people actually do not need to be asking their dad to drop them round at the clinic so they can get advice. They are sometimes dependent on other people. With telemedicine, they can go with privacy and talk at their own chosen time and place, without having to answer back to a parent or an abusive partner. In other words, telemedicine offers privacy and can help women stay safe.

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness O'Loan

Committee stage
Friday 12th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

My Lords, it is very regrettable that the noble Lord had a patient in an abortion situation. We are not, in this group, discussing the doctor’s wishes or otherwise and his views about abortion. I ask the Minister, because I can hear mutterings here, what provision says that you cannot intervene in a debate where you have not been present, perhaps, at the very first moment of the debate? What is the section in the Companion that provides for that?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, returning to the amendments that we are discussing, I want to commend the sponsors of the Bill in the sense that, when I read the Bill, multiples clauses referred to the applicant’s GP. There is an assumption, however, of an ongoing relationship with that GP. If there is not, we can come back to that. I had assumed that there is an ongoing relationship. The noble Lord, Lord Rook, has raised some of the real challenges to why that might not be realistic.

The problem is that, if there is no assumption of an ongoing relationship but simply a visit to a GP, it seems to me completely meaningless. You go in for a 10-minute meeting with a GP, which is transient and patchy at best, as they are unlikely to be able to make any clinical assessment of great merit. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, referred to the real-life situation of not seeing a GP but how pleasant it was.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness O'Loan (CB)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention. I also want to raise the risk of domestic abuse, which is much higher during pregnancy. The Maternal Mental Health Alliance says that up to 30% of domestic abuse cases begin during pregnancy.

Ending someone’s life with lethal drugs while they are pregnant raises additional layers of moral, legal and medical concern—for example, consent, the viability of the baby, conflicts of interest, et cetera. Pregnancy causes drugs to be processed differently. The rate of absorption is affected by physiological changes. That could mean a slower or more prolonged death from the approved substances for both mother and child. Women are particularly vulnerable, and the safeguards just do not seem to be in the Bill at present.

The amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, in this group relate also to those up to the age of 25 who have an EHCP, which may be provided to vulnerable children, including those with special educational needs and mental health concerns.

Finally, the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, has told us that young people with complex needs may be at a higher risk of internalising negative societal values about their disabilities. The National Down Syndrome Policy Group states that people with learning disabilities can be highly suggestible and prone to acquiescence bias, agreeing with authority figures to please them.

There may also be diagnostic overshadowing, the risk that a young person’s desire to die might be as a consequence. In this context, a young person with an EHCP, for example, might request assisted dying not because their condition is intolerable but because the social care and support legally promised to them has failed to materialise, making their daily life situation unbearable. That could be misinterpreted by clinicians as a rational choice due to their disability. It is therefore the case that special provisions, such as those identified in these amendments, are necessary to ensure proper support, and that the various vulnerable groups of people do not feel that they have no choice.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to speak specifically to Amendment 22, about why prisoners should not be eligible for assisted dying. The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, are also pertinent here.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester raised the real and specific safeguard issues from the lack of medical records of prisoners, and I am sure we will hear more about the problems of medical care for prisoners. The terrible terminal diagnosis that one might get as a prisoner would be particularly frightening, I would think, because of the lack of medical care.

That is actually not my concern. Regardless of where one stands on assisted dying in general, I really hope that, when it comes to this Bill, noble Lords will consider the very particular circumstances of those incarcerated by the state. I hope the sponsors of the Bill will still be open to excluding prisoners and keeping them out of the Bill, on the basis, if nothing else, of their lack of autonomy.

I have to confess that I was rather taken aback when I heard Minister Stephen Kinnock in the other place state that excluding prisoners from this Bill would lead to a difference in treatment between prisoners and non-prisoners, an inequality, citing Article 8, private life, and Article 14, discrimination, of the ECHR. He noted that differential treatment would require objective and reasonable justification. It seems a bit shocking to me to have to explain this to a Minister, but my objective and reasonable justification is that, if you are in prison, you do not have the same rights as if you are not in prison. I did not make that up—although I know the Sentencing Bill has gone a bit liberal.

Actually, I think that, you know, you are deprived of your liberty. Many of the arguments made by the advocates of the Bill about autonomy and giving people choice towards the end of life, in particular circumstances —which I completely understand, philosophically and politically—are entirely appropriate for free people. But when you are not free and do not have autonomy, it brings with it a whole new range of ethical dilemmas.

The purpose of prison is, as I have said, to suspend certain rights from people to protect the public, to ensure deterrence and to uphold a sense of justice in society—I could go on. When the state has deprived an individual of so much autonomy, for all the criminal justice reasons we know, offering the option of an assisted death does not increase their autonomy in a meaningful way. It is saying, “Oh, well, we’re giving them choice”—but their real choice would be being able to leave. In other words, we have limited their choices.

Why does this matter? It is because, when the state decides to deprive somebody of their liberty, it is a very serious decision. For me, it is the worst possible punishment you could give: you are limited in being free, which I obviously consider to be very important. Prisoners, inevitably, are depressed: and often they are vulnerable in the first place. That is why they are prone to suicidal ideation.

Those of us who have had the privilege of doing some work with prisoners will know that we spend a lot of time tackling self-harm, with people hating themselves and the circumstances they are in. We do a lot of work on that. I and many others have worked on IPP prisoners, who are, ridiculously unfairly, still in prison indefinitely based on an abolished sentence, often for minor breaches of the law in the past. It is always shocking when you hear of another IPP prisoner who has taken their life. It is particularly horrible, as many noble Lords here have articulated far better than I can, because it is almost like it is on the state’s conscience. That is the reason why coroners make such a fuss about it. Those prisoners should not be there; they are in prison because the state made a mistake with the sentencing regime that it will not resolve and then they take their life. The state is somehow implicated in those suicides and we make a particular point of that.

Those of us who have worked in prisons will also know that suicide prevention is something we take very seriously. It does not matter how heinous the prisoner’s crime is. They could be a child abuser, a rapist or a murderer, but, if there is even a hint that they might commit suicide, there is suicide watch. We do all sorts of suicide prevention. The reason is that, as a humane society, we do not think that people should be allowed to take their own life, if at all possible. We have suicide watch in prison because the state has somebody incarcerated. Therefore, as a humane society, you take seriously not letting them kill themselves: otherwise, you could just say, “Carry on boys, it doesn’t matter”. We do not do that because we think that we have to protect those prisoners in the state’s care.

Right, I will finish. Letting prisoners have access to and be eligible for assisted death would be very close to reckless state abandonment of those prisoners to something very deeply dark. Philosophically, if a penal sentence in Britain ends up with the state effectively putting a prisoner to death via lethal drugs—I do not want to go on, but that is what would have to happen: they would be locked up in a prison, in the state’s care, the state would then make them eligible to ask for assisted dying, with limited autonomy, and would then hand them lethal drugs—that is far too like capital punishment, which I have long opposed and do not approve of. Therefore, even if you do not agree with me on the rest of the Bill being a completely difficult challenge to humanity, which I think it is, I none the less suggest that, if we pass it, we should absolutely exempt prisoners from it.