International Women’s Day

Debate between Jackie Doyle-Price and Peter Bottomley

Thursday 9th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[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?

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

It is worth remembering that an early Conservative woman Member of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher, in 1967 both voted to decriminalise male homosexual acts and stayed up all night to help get David Steel’s Abortion Bill through the House of Commons.

Can I put it to my hon. Friend that, given that it is now so common and that there are over 200,000 abortions a year in this country—it takes two to tango, so that is 400,000 people contributing, some perhaps more than once, but not many—we ought to make it easier? People who decide that having an abortion is appropriate, should be able to do it easily and safely, without embarrassment.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

That is exactly the point that I was coming on to make. I absolutely respect why Members of this House have ideological objections to abortion and why they will always vote to restrict it. However, the fact is that abortion is an established right in this country, and it is our obligation to ensure that those laws are safe and that women can access abortion as early as possible in their pregnancies. That is actually the most important thing and the safest thing, and that is why they must be much more readily available.

Let me make a point to the Front Bench—which I fear will fall on deaf ears, just because we continue to see this as an issue of conscience, rather than of safety—that this is something that really ought to be reviewed. I would suggest to the Minister that we have, in our women’s health ambassador, Lesley Regan, someone who, as a former head of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, is eminently qualified to undertake a review, perhaps not to make recommendations, but to just highlight how the current abortion law is not fit for purpose, so that we can properly review how we might improve it.

The way in which the Abortion Act is established is not encouraging a healthy debate about the issue either—on both sides, I might add. That is the starting frame of reference, so we end up in this ridiculous debate about time limits. Ultimately, we just need to get away from that and think about it as a health procedure. When that Act was passed back in 1967, it was a radical and empowering measure that advanced women’s rights, but here we are, more than 50 years later, and we need to take a good look at it.

International Women’s Day

Debate between Jackie Doyle-Price and Peter Bottomley

Thursday 10th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

My apologies—how could I forget my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley)?

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I had planned to listen rather than speak, but can I say two things to my hon. Friend? The first is to ask whether in winding up this debate, the Minister can say what harm was done by, and what benefits there were from, early, easy and safe contraception by telephone. There is a responsibility on Government to give that information in the open so that we can challenge it if necessary, or agree with it if they say it was safe, easy and convenient—that it had benefits.

Secondly, on the issue of sex and gender, I agree with my hon. Friend that people need to speak much more openly, and that those who call people like Professor Kathleen Stock a dangerous extremist for her book “Material Girls” clearly have not read it. She, Jo Phoenix and others have written very plainly and sympathetically about trans people, but have also written determinedly that sex matters, and that women should be safe and feel protected.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments. The fact remains that women are entitled to single-sex spaces for their own sake; this should not just be about risk assessment and danger. We should be able to make choices about when we want to enter spaces without men present, and that should be as important as any potential risk that any man might pose.

I will focus the substance of my comments this afternoon on the criminal justice system, though, as we are talking about breaking the bias. I do so in my capacity as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system. Without reiterating points made by my hon. Friends, this comes back to the point that men and women are different, and our laws and—in particular—our criminal justice system need to reflect that.

We have had a real move towards gender neutrality in how we approach public service delivery and how we produce law, but standing here in a debate to commemorate International Women’s Day, I tend to view gender neutrality as just another way of centring men, because it is making us all the same, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the criminal justice system. We have a penal system built on prisons and based on the principle that we incarcerate violent, dangerous men, and that has been the approach to women. We have seen study after study that has shown that prison is not the best place for women offenders, because more often than not, women offenders are more vulnerable than their male counterparts.

Call me a pink-hearted liberal, but I tend to view our prison population as being full of people who have been failed by the state, and that is a matter of shame for me. It is particularly the case when it comes to women. We know that there are high rates of illiteracy and innumeracy among our prisoners, so how are they going to get on in life? We know that there are a huge number of people who have been through the care system and then been left on the scrapheap. In the case of women, we know that many of them are victims of sexual abuse, and in that context, prison is not the best place for them, and study after study has shown that.

Every time we make progress in this area and we start to say, “This is an opportunity for a first intervention to support women and address that vulnerability”, we then seem to go backwards. I highlight the fact that this Government have a female offenders strategy but equally are investing in 500 more prison places for women, and we need to properly join the dots and use the opportunities to make interventions to support women and break the cycle of offending. We all know that once someone has been incarcerated, the chance that they then embark on a lifetime of reoffending and re-entering prison is very high. That is not good for them, but nor is it good for society or the taxpayer. We need to get this right.

We know also that many women do not belong in prison in the first place. One issue I have been taking up with the Ministry of Justice is the extent to which women are remanded in prison for their own protection. We have a mental health policy that has been removing police cells and prisons as places of safety—recognising that they are not good environments for people who are mentally unwell—but we are still remanding women in prison for their own safety. I thought it would be only a small number of women, probably no more than a dozen a year. Having raised the issue with the Government, I could not get any data on it. However, Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons visited three prisons last year and in total found 68 women who had been remanded in prison for their own protection. They were not people who had committed an offence, and it was not a punishment. It is totally inappropriate for a country such as this to be remanding women in prison for that purpose, and that was in just three prisons. Across the whole system, we know that women being remanded for their own protection are a significant proportion of the prison establishment, and frankly that is not good enough. I am ashamed of it, and I call on the Government to do better.

My criticism is not with the Ministry of Justice. One of the issues is that the Ministry of Justice is sweeping up the failings of other organisations within the public sector. It is sweeping up the ability of local authorities to offer safe spaces for women to be sent to when they are at risk. Mental health services are sweeping up that failure by the Department of Health and Social Care, and I encourage the Ministry of Justice to be rather more robust in its dealings with other Departments and say, “You know what? These are not our problems, they are yours.” We should not be dealing with vulnerable people within our estate.

The other side of the criminal justice system where women are particularly negatively impacted is as victims, and we have had a number of debates in recent weeks about the poor prosecution rates for sexual violence crimes and rape in particular. Having spoken to victims, I understand that one of the reasons for that is that they are treated as a piece of evidence in that prosecution. If someone has gone through trauma, constantly reliving that in a dehumanising way is not the best way to ensure that we bring people to punishment. We really have to look at that.

There has been a lot of investment in services, but we have still not got it right. My biggest challenge on that point is that the likelihood of a victim getting justice depends on who they are. Victim-blaming, which we heard reference to earlier in the debate, is at the heart of that. Over and over again, assumptions are made about victims that impede their ability to get justice. White working-class girls in northern towns and cities were victims of abuse for many years before public authorities would pay proper attention to it, because they were not prepared to make that challenge.

I also highlight what we loosely describe as “honour killings”. What kind of a phrase is that to describe people being murdered? They are murdered by their families, who should love them and keep them safe, and we call that an honour killing—“honour”, which is a positive word, and “killing” for murder. That very phrase is an illustration of the discrimination against those victims; I am getting emotional just thinking about it.

In the context of the list that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) read out, we do not have to do much of a study to realise the socio-economic background of most of those victims. The only ones that we ever read about in the papers—the ones who the media get excited about—are nice white middle-class people with professional backgrounds. People who engage in prostitution disappear every week and do not get a column inch, but they are victims. They are women who are victims of male violence against women and girls.

Let us not pussyfoot around it: this is a gendered crime. My hon. Friends who are present—my hon. Friends the Members for Boston and Skegness, for Devizes, for Harwich and North Essex, for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) and for Worthing West—will not take offence when I point out that those crimes are committed by men, which is exactly what we need to face up to. We will not tackle that issue unless we tackle it as a society, which means men stepping up too.