Decriminalising Abortion

Debate between Jim Shannon and Tony Vaughan

Monday 2nd June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

My hon. Friend is right, and of course it was a 2018 Supreme Court decision that showed that the rules that were then in force in Northern Ireland violated the human rights of women. That has to be at the centre of our considerations.

Let me finish listing the exceptions so that I can get to the point. Risk of grave or permanent injury, risk to the mother’s life and substantial foetal abnormality are exceptions without any gestational time limit.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

[Tony Vaughan]

I will press on, because I am conscious of the time. Maybe we will come back to this.

[Jim Shannon]

We have three hours.

[Tony Vaughan]

All right then.

[Jim Shannon]

The reason I knew that is because before the debate I checked with you, Mr Vickers, that we would have ample time to speak. It is important to put something on the record about the abortion legislation in Northern Ireland. I say this respectfully to the hon. and learned Gentleman, who knows that that is the way I always try to make my points: the legislation in Northern Ireland was imposed by Westminster because we did not have a Northern Ireland Assembly that was working at the time. The elected representatives therefore could not have an input into the process, and, according to the polls, the people of Northern Ireland were very much against the type of legislation coming in. He refers to the Northern Ireland legislation, but it is Northern Ireland legislation that the Government here imposed; Northern Ireland had no input into it.

[Tony Vaughan]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I come back to what I said to the right hon. Member for Gainsborough: whatever the position at the time of the law’s coming into force, I am not aware of there being a movement or democratic support for changing the law back to what it was before. When we talk about whether laws meet the current standards and societal norms, that is the most important thing.

Let me turn to how the law is applied in England and Wales. Until 2022, it was believed that only three women had been convicted of having an illegal abortion in the 150 years since the 1861 Act, under which most illegal abortions are prosecuted, but there has been a recent increase in the prosecutions of women for procuring miscarriage under the Act. The Crown Prosecution Service reports that in the period January 2019 to March 2023, six people were charged with child destruction and 11 were charged with procuring miscarriage under section 58 of the 1861 Act.

One of those people was Nicola Packer, who took home abortion medication following a teleconsultation, believing that she was less than 10 weeks pregnant. She was in fact 26 weeks pregnant, and was accused of having an illegal abortion. On 7 November 2020, she was in hospital. The next day—

UK-China Relations

Debate between Jim Shannon and Tony Vaughan

Wednesday 26th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Tony Vaughan]

I completely agree that a national security-first approach to China must be the position. As I understand it, that is the position of the Government. That is why the position taken on the embassy is a national security issue; I know that there has been some debate about that, but I am not in a position to second-guess MI6, MI5 and the security services, and that has to be the lens through which we look at these issues.

I have referred to the EFD outcomes. Critics of engagement overlook the fact that some nations who took a robust approach to China were still engaging in the background. If we step back while competitors—including the United States, which has also taken a robust approach to China—are engaging, we are missing a trick. The UK had not sent a Prime Minister to China in many years. I am pleased that the Government aim to have a relationship with China based on what I understand to be a national security approach, while also co-operating with, competing with and challenging China where appropriate. Engaging with does not, of course, meaning agreeing with.

[Jim Shannon]

I have listened to what the hon. Gentleman has said. I am conscious of what he is putting forward, but I do not hear anything in his speech to do with human rights or religious persecution. We must make that central to our economic business with China. That is the Minister’s mission, and I hope the hon. Gentleman will come on to that shortly and reassure us that those are also his thoughts.

[Tony Vaughan]

That is exactly what I am now moving on to. As I said, engaging with does not mean agreeing with. Part of our stable and consistent relationship with China involves raising human rights concerns with it, stably and consistently, as the Prime Minister did with the case of Jimmy Lai when he met President Xi last year. I recently met Jimmy Lai’s son Sebastien and the barristers representing his father and I was very concerned to hear of Jimmy Lai’s deteriorating medical situation. I urge the Prime Minister to meet his team to discuss what the British Government can do to effect his release.

Another example is the compelling evidence of the use of forced labour in energy supply chains in China, especially polysilicon. I do not believe our green energy transition should be built from solar panels built using forced labour. We must take a whole-of-industry approach, with robust safeguards against the import of solar panels when it cannot be shown that they are free from forced labour. In the long term, our country needs to become self-sufficient in our industrial supply chains, such as renewable technology production. I completely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Chris McDonald) said about protecting UK domestic industries and jobs, which must be prioritised.

A grown-up relationship with China means believing that we should work with China on areas that do not impact national security and human rights, while also putting our foot down in areas that do. It will always be a highly complex bilateral relationship, with tricky trade-offs and tensions, and I fully accept that there is a role for pressing China extremely hard, as some in this Chamber have done. I am pleased to see the Government’s success so far in bringing stability and pragmatism to that relationship.