Decriminalising Abortion
Sadik Al-Hassan Excerpts(4 days, 11 hours ago)
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Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. As mentioned, abortion is currently a criminal offence in England and Wales under the Offences against the Person Act 1861, and unless certain conditions are met, we have the harshest punishment in the world for illegal abortion: life imprisonment. That is despite the fact that the UK is an overwhelmingly pro-choice nation, with a recent YouGov poll showing that 87% of the British public say that abortion should be allowed in the UK, compared with just 6% who say it should not.
Like that overwhelming majority of the country, I fully support a woman’s right to choose. Having been a frontline healthcare worker for 20 years, I can say with experience and conviction that access to safe and legal abortion is a fundamental aspect of any modern healthcare system. It is crucial that women and girls around the country have access to safe, high-quality healthcare that supports their wellbeing—and that must include their sexual and reproductive healthcare.
That is why I was proud to sign new clause 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), to the Crime and Policing Bill. The new clause would decriminalise abortion and make it clear that no woman should ever be prosecuted for ending her pregnancy within the widely agreed upon 24-week window. With over 90 MPs from eight parties now supporting the new clause, I am confident that we will finally right this historic wrong and stop this infringement upon women’s rights.
This issue has been debated for far too long. It is an outrage that we have made such limited progress on updating a law that was passed 164 years ago, despite the immense societal change we have undergone in that time. Although the last Parliament made some limited progress on this issue, particularly by legislating for a safe access zone around abortion clinics and hospitals, it failed to legislate on what so many people are crying out for, which will forever be a stain on its record. Let us not repeat that mistake; let us make progress and finally bring this injustice to an end.