Crime and Policing Bill

Lord Winston Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 18th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am just carrying on; I am sorry.

Mr Worby was jailed in December 2024 after arranging for a friend’s girlfriend to pretend to be pregnant and acquire abortion pills for him via the pills by post scheme. He then spiked a woman’s drink with those pills to induce an abortion against her knowledge. Again, he could not have obtained the pills if in-person appointments were still mandatory.

Thirdly, in-person appointments allow for possible health risks to be checked to assess whether it is safe for a woman to undergo a medical, rather than a surgical, abortion.

The problems with the pills by post scheme are well documented, with FoI requests suggesting that one in 17 women requires hospital treatment afterwards. These risks were strikingly drawn to our attention by a letter, which has already been mentioned, from more than 1,000 medical professionals who support Amendments 424 and 425. I am glad too for the support of Dr Caroline Johnson MP, who still practises as a paediatrician and brought forward the same amendment in the other place.

The seriousness of this issue was brought home to me when I had the opportunity, in January, to meet with a woman whose sister tragically died after taking abortion pills via the pills by post scheme, leaving behind young children. The medical conditions the woman had, which meant she should have been deemed high risk, may well have been picked up in a clinical context. However, after a telephone consultation, she was sent pills in the post by BPAS and died suddenly minutes after taking the final set of pills.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Stroud (Con)]

I am sorry; I am going to keep going.

This amendment would ensure that women are offered the best possible care at in-person appointments, where medical history can be discussed with a woman.

Amendment 425 is not about whether we are pro-life or pro-choice; it is about safeguarding women. Polling last summer found that two-thirds of women support the return of in-person appointments; a mere 4% support the status quo. Abortion providers provided abortion services before the pandemic, with no major problems for access. I urge colleagues to support Amendment 425, which is a far more proportionate response to the handful of court cases that have occurred in recent years than that offered by Clause 208, which makes matters worse and removes legal protections for unborn babies up to birth. Amendment 425 would not reduce access to abortion for women, but it would ensure that their health needs are properly catered for.

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[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords—

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[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I say to my noble friends who will try to come in shortly that we have had a reasonably long debate on this group and we had a very long debate in Committee. I have begun to hear calls for the Front Benches. I offer the House a reminder that this is Report: the stage when we vote to make decisions. I hope that we can quickly begin to move on to hear from the Front Benches.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful that the Chief Whip will offer me the chance to speak for a couple of minutes. We have always agreed that this is an expert House, and it helps to make sure that legislation is best addressed by expertise where it can be. One of the things we might want to consider in this debate is that there are at least two Members of this House who have given at least 100 years in total to the management of people having terminations of pregnancy —so we do know quite a lot about it. There is also a large number of people who have not spoken who are fellows of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, who I think have been rather insulted by some of the things they have heard today because they do not represent the views of most members.

Having said that, I just want to say two things very simply. I firmly believe in decriminalisation. There is a great deal of misapprehension, as was just shown by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The fact of the matter is that you cannot induce a pregnancy close to term. In fact, I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will agree with me that it is virtually impossible to induce labour in a woman who does not have ruptured membranes at term with drugs. It just does not work. In fact, both he and I—numerous times, if I am not wrong—have been faced with caesarean sections that we did not want to do as the only way we could get a baby out of the womb when it was in danger. We could not use drugs to induce labour, because they do not work. That certainly applies to pills but even to drugs given intravenously. It is therefore important to understand that a termination of a pregnancy conducted by a woman herself will be an extremely rare event. It would be very difficult, and the idea that pills will work is nonsensical.

Moreover, we have heard a lot about pills, but nobody has told us yet what pills they are talking about. That is very important. The hormones that are usually used in early pregnancy would not work in late pregnancy. The other thing I have already mentioned is that pretty well all late terminations of pregnancy are done for very serious medical conditions. One of the commonest ones is where there is an extremely deformed baby in the womb. I described this during the earlier stages of the Bill, and I will not go through it again. The indications of these late pregnancies are always very carefully and scrupulously observed. They are not done lightly.

I should also add that, sadly, babies born much after 24 weeks still are very likely to be highly abnormal. Even though people often miscarry them when they do not want to, sometimes it can be the very best thing that can happen because these babies will eventually die early with very severe abnormalities.

Recently, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, chaired a committee on this very issue to see how we could reduce the number of premature births. It is a big problem in medicine because of the risks to the babies when they are born after 28 weeks. I shall say no more except that I firmly believe we should really try to understand this from the woman’s point of view. No woman tries to interrupt her pregnancy except with the deepest grief and the deepest unhappiness.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords—