Crime and Policing Bill

Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 455 in my name seeks to preserve legal protection for unborn babies who could survive outside the womb. Clause 191 would fully decriminalise abortions by stating that a woman would commit no offence in relation to her own pregnancy. In doing so, it would disapply not only Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 but the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929. This is a serious change. Much of the attention has focused on the 1861 Act, with less attention given to the removal of the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, which protects viable unborn babies. When the 1929 Act was passed, viability was understood to be around 28 weeks. Today, it is generally around 24 weeks, but medical advances mean that some babies can survive from around 22 weeks. Our abortion law recognises viability, and this is precisely why there is a time limit.

Clause 191 would remove protections where the death of a viable baby was caused by the mother, meaning that even a full-term baby could be aborted by the mother with no legal consequences. A baby’s protection would then depend not on whether it could survive independently but on who ended its life. This cannot be right. Under the current law, a woman at 32 weeks’ pregnancy—when a baby is fully formed—who contacts an abortion service may receive support, counselling or discuss adoption, but an abortion cannot be performed. Under Clause 191, however, she could obtain pills and end her own pregnancy without breaking the law. The consequence is clear: no prosecution at any stage, for any reason, even when a baby is capable of being born alive. That would overturn the careful balance Parliament has maintained for decades.

My amendment is deliberately modest. It allows the disapplication of Sections 58 and 59 of the 1861 Act but retains the 1929 Act so that the deliberate destruction of a viable unborn child remains an offence. This is not about reopening the wider abortion debate; it is about ensuring that viable babies do not lose their legal protection rights.

There are also practical concerns. Abortion pills are easily obtained and sometimes used dangerously late in pregnancy. Removing all criminal liability removes an important safeguard and may leave coercion and abuse undiscovered. Judges already exercise compassion in the very small number of cases that come before the courts. Clause 191 goes far beyond that by removing accountability altogether. The current law strikes a balance: abortion is permitted up to 24 weeks, and beyond that, only in exceptional circumstances. Removing all limits is to cross a line. Close to birth, the difference between a foetus and a newborn may be a matter of hours, yet one would be fully protected in law, while the other could lawfully be destroyed. We do not allow infanticides of newborn babies, so why should the law treat a full-term unborn baby differently?

This proposal was not in the manifesto and has had no public consultation. Such a profound change deserves scrutiny. Public support for abortion up to full term is very limited, while support for protection after viability is strong.

I do not oppose abortion in all circumstances, but diluting the already limited protection for viable unborn babies is just a step too far. Without limits backed by meaningful legal deterrent, women may come under pressure to terminate pregnancy late in their terms, sometimes against their own wishes or consent. Clause 191 may also facilitate disability-selective abortion and sex-selective abortion, placing unborn girls at particular risk. For that reason, I support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, to prevent sex-selective abortions, which already exist in this country.

The noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, has tabled an amendment to remove Clause 191 altogether, and I hope it will command wide support. My amendment sits alongside it and ensures that this Committee focuses clearly on what Clause 191 really does and on the rights of viable babies. If we cannot protect children at the very beginning of life, when they are at their most vulnerable, what credibility do we have when we claim to put children first? I therefore urge the Committee to reject the clause. I beg to move.

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Clause 191 standing part of the Bill.

Our role as parliamentarians, especially in this House, is to ensure that laws that make it on to the statute book are safe. Good laws require careful thought and prior consideration regarding any unintended consequences. Clause 191 fails to meet these criteria and should not become law. It was hastily added to an unrelated Bill and concerns a proposal that was neither a government manifesto commitment, nor called for by the public, nor subject to even rudimentary scrutiny.

Let me be clear: the law change proposed by Clause 191 does not relate primarily to one’s views on abortion, on which there will be a range of perspectives in this House. The abortion debate is often presented as pitting the rights of a woman against the rights of an unborn child at varying stages of development. It is not accidental that the legal limit for abortion is 24 weeks. That marks roughly the stage at which the baby is fully viable when born. This clause not only fails even to consider that person but would endanger the mother.

Laws exist for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they exist to deter us from doing things that would cause significant harm to ourselves or others, out of motives that may be devious or simply desperate. The current law prohibiting women from performing their own abortions after 24 weeks is one such law. The existing legal deterrent protects women. For example, if a partner seeks to pressure a woman into an abortion beyond the 24-week limit, a limit which I note is already double that common in most European countries, a woman can currently point to the criminal law as a reason for not doing so. Removing this would make it much harder for vulnerable women to resist such pressure and would be particularly troubling given the dangers of unsupervised self-induced abortions later in pregnancy.

There is a supreme irony that those who claim to support legal abortion on the basis that the alternative would be unsafe—illegal abortions—are now proposing that women can perform such illegal abortions, outside the terms of the Abortion Act, in an unsafe environment. This law change would, in effect, reintroduce back-street abortion, as women would not be able to have terminations in a clinic beyond the 24-week limit but could do so at home, on their own, without the prospect of any subsequent investigation, using pills not designed for use outside of a clinical context beyond 10 weeks. The potential consequences are terrifying.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Does the noble Baroness accept that none of these things has happened in Northern Ireland? We changed the law and decriminalised abortion in Northern Ireland several years ago and literally none of the things that she is mentioning has happened there—nor in any of the other 50 countries where abortion is being decriminalised.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

If the noble Baroness will bear with me, we cannot have an intervention on an intervention. She must allow the response.

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. Is she aware that, despite the extreme abortion regime that was imposed on Northern Ireland by the other place, there is no telemedicine in Northern Ireland? That is one thing we do not have.

[Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)]

I received a letter from a former paediatric practitioner who is deeply concerned about this proposed legislation. She points out that when babies are legally aborted for medical reasons at over 22 weeks’ gestation, they are first euthanised by lethal injection into the heart. This is recommended by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to prevent larger sentient babies from being delivered injured but still alive. She asks what will happen if Clause 191 becomes law, this form of foeticide is not performed, abortion medication is taken and the baby is born alive.

Contrary to claims of supporters of Clause 191, women are not facing lengthy prison sentences for illegal abortions. The most high-profile case in recent years, of a woman who was 32 to 34 weeks pregnant but admitted misleading the British Pregnancy Advisory Service by telling it she was seven weeks pregnant, resulted initially in a short prison sentence that was quickly suspended on appeal. Sarah Catt was convicted in 2012 for a 39-week abortion, having been described by the chief inspector who led the investigation as “cold and calculating”. The judge in the case on appeal, Mrs Justice Rafferty, said:

“Mrs Catt caused the death of a foetus at term … She planned what she did with some care. She ensured that when she delivered the infant, it was in private. Somewhere there is a body”.


Under Clause 191, it would not even be permissible for the police to have investigated such a case. When Tonia Antoniazzi, the proposer of this clause, was interviewed by the House magazine and asked about this case, she said:

“If you can be cold and callous, you need to be helped and you need to be taken out of the criminal system”.


That opens an extraordinary vista.

A tiny proportion of the hundreds of thousands of abortions a year have resulted in women facing prosecution. The solution to these cases is not to decriminalise abortion to term for women in relation to their own pregnancies but rather to restore in-person consultations before women are able to obtain abortion pills, to enable a reliable gestational age check to take place. It is for this reason that I support Amendment 460, tabled in the name of my noble friend Lady Stroud.

Maya Ellis, one of the Clause 191 supporters in the other place, said that a woman should

“not be criminalised for anything to do with or within her body”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/6/25; col. 322.]

This is the case for absolute decriminalisation of abortion in any circumstances, and that is the true intention of the proposers of this clause, but it means that up to full term the viable unborn child would have the moral status of property, just as a slave did in the American Deep South in the 18th century. No one could be criminally liable for the destruction of their own human property. I do not consider this progressive.

We are told that Clause 191 is a moderate change to the law that would not affect the 24-week time limit. However, given that most abortions now take place outside a clinical setting and without an in-person consultation, the 24-week time limit would become redundant. Women could simply tell an abortion provider that they are below the legal limit and, in all likelihood, they would be sent the pills by post.

It is for this reason that a legal deterrent underpinning the 24-week limit is more important in the current context. Clause 191 is not moderate; it is radical. Its effect is to decriminalise abortions of babies up to birth if a woman seeks to induce a termination late in pregnancy by obtaining easily acquired pills.

The Bill is an important and lengthy piece of legislation that we have been debating in Committee over two and a half months. It was not designed, and is not an appropriate forum, to bring further widening of already highly permissive abortion laws. It is astonishing that the Committee is being asked to consider such a far-reaching law with so little prior scrutiny.