Abortion is healthcare, not a police matter

Something unthinkable has happened. A woman in England has received a 28 month sentence, which includes 14 months in custody, because she took pills to have an abortion.

As a result, Carla Foster, a mother of three, will miss all of her children’s next birthdays before she will be released. This is a profoundly tragic situation that never should have happened. Now we need your help to right this wrong by reforming an inhumane law. Will you write to your MP today?

For years, we’ve warned that a Victorian law on abortion – passed in 1861, long before women even had the right to vote – could come back to haunt vulnerable women today, especially those at risk of domestic violence. And that’s exactly what’s happened.

This tragedy was only possible because abortion was never truly decriminalised in Great Britain. Instead, the 1967 Abortion Act was a legal ‘compromise’ between women’s rights activists and religious campaigners. It introduced a narrow legal route to abortion with support from two doctors alongside other criteria. But outside this narrow window, abortion remained a ‘crime’.

For decades, our policy has been this:

• Take abortion out of the criminal code altogether

• Retain all existing abortion regulations, including term limits, as civil law

• Treat abortion as a healthcare matter – not a police matter

In 2019, the UK Parliament took this approach when it voted to legalise abortion in Northern Ireland. We’re now calling for politicians to modernise abortion law across the UK.

Managing your reproductive health is a human right, not a criminal act!