International Women’s Day

Debate between Jackie Doyle-Price and Anna Firth

Thursday 9th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Vicky Ford]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

If my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend do not mind, I will make some progress, because at the moment my speech has been entirely interventions.

I am glad to see the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) in her place because I want to talk about abortion. It is very important that we in this place—the mother of Parliaments, this advanced democracy—challenge ourselves about whether the laws we have are really fit for purpose, particularly when on things such as abortion we are quite good at lecturing the rest of the world. My fundamental view is that our abortion law is currently not safe. The most important thing we can do in this place is make sure that our laws do no harm. I have said this before in this House, but the law we have regulating abortions—the Abortion Act 1967—is older than me. I have not worn too well, but, frankly, that has worn even worse. It is in desperate need of reform. I am afraid that while we treat this as an issue of conscience, we are failing women, because that law predates medical abortion. It deals with a situation where the only terminations women could have were surgical, which, as we all know, are more dangerous, and the law is drawn up on that basis, which is why it relies on two doctors having to certify that the procedure is necessary. Do we really need two doctors now, when we have the availability of medical abortion? I just do not think it is necessary.

Back in the 1990s, when Kenneth Clarke was Secretary of State for Health—so we are going back a long way—the abortion law was amended at that point to enable abortions to take place in settings different from the licensed establishments that the state approves of. However, it took until the pandemic for that to be made a reality, and the reality made was not the one intended at the time the law was passed in the 1990s. It recognised that we now had medical abortion, which could be administered safely by pill, and the whole idea, when Ken Clarke accepted that amendment, was that we would be able to access abortions in places such as family planning clinics and places of beauty, instead of the stigmatised list of places that have to be regulated by the Secretary of State. That, by the way, has made sure that our abortions are a monopoly service provided by two providers in the independent sector; they are very rarely done by the NHS. Earlier this week, we discussed the Public Order Bill and the whole issue of protest, but would there really be so much protest if abortion services were more embedded in our established national health service, instead of being shunted away into the back streets somewhere, which makes them a target?