Crime and Policing Bill

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

I take the hon. Lady’s point, although the same would apply if someone were face to face with a doctor; for example, I could get abortion pills and then give them to someone else after my appointment. I represent a semi-rural constituency, where we struggle with lack of bus routes and medical facilities. I understand her concerns about coercion, but there will be lots of women in my constituency who are victims of domestic violence and coercion for whom it will be significantly harder to access telemedicine were her amendment to be passed. A point was made about middle-class people, but it would be poorer people who struggle to access the service as a result of her amendment.

[Dr Johnson]

The hon. Lady is correct that if a woman got the tablets at a clinic, she could give them to somebody else, but in order to get them in the first place she would need to be 10 weeks pregnant, and the clinician would check that she was pregnant. When the medication appears not to have worked, questions would perhaps be asked about where the tablets had gone, so I think there is an inherent safety feature there.

The hon. Lady brings up the issue of bus routes. That is important, but the question is whether we should improve the bus routes or make medical services less safe. Most clinical services are accessed by individuals attending hospitals or clinics, and in some respects this instance is no different, because it is important that proper medical checks are done. I am not trying to limit people’s access to what is clinically legally available. I am trying to make sure that people are safe when they do so.

I want to turn to women who have been trafficked or are being forced into sex work. We talked yesterday in the House about young girls who had been groomed and raped in the grooming gangs scandal. Would we put it past those evil, nasty men to have got drugs and given them to these young girls to hide the evidence of their crimes? I would not.

What about those who want to preserve the honour of their family by preventing their daughter from being pregnant? What about those who think that the baby being carried by their partner is of the wrong gender—they would like a boy but are having a girl? What about those who are trying to cover up sexual abuse, particularly of teenagers and young girls, by causing a termination to hide the evidence of their crimes? What if a partner does not want a baby? Stuart Worby got caught, was prosecuted and is rightly in jail, but how many others have done that and not got caught? We simply will never know.

No one knows who is taking these medications. If we have proper clinics, gestation can be checked, a clinician can ascertain more effectively if a woman is being coerced, and they can make the abortion medically as safe as possible. My amendment is not pro-life or pro-choice. It is pro-safety.