Contribution
My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 426C and thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Falkner, Lady Spielman and Lady Lawlor, for their support. I will also speak in support of Amendment 422E, to which I have added my name.
Before explaining why we have tabled Amendment 426C, I give a little context. Like, I am sure, all other noble Lords, I have received a great deal of correspondence on Clause 208. One thing repeatedly said by proponents is that, apart from decriminalising all instances of maternal abortion, nothing would change. The Fawcett Society, for example, says that apart from this one change, the Abortion Act 1967 would continue to operate as it always has. However, I think this is quite mistaken. We are not tidying up a small drafting error here; we are making a fundamental change to the law. When you make a fundamental change to the law, you change perceptions and behaviour, and it has knock-on effects.
We have heard, for example, that there has been a marked change in the number of investigations related to abortion. We have also learned—the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, alluded to this—that the changes are a bit more complicated than we might have thought. There has been an increase in the number of investigations related to procuring illegal abortion offences, but at the same time there has been a decrease in the number of investigations for intentional destruction of a viable unborn child. For example, there were seven investigations of intentional destruction of a viable unborn child in 2025, compared with 18 in 2023. Only one person, a male, was proceeded against in the most recent year. Clearly, something is going on but, equally clearly, it seems to be a little more complicated than we might think and the Government do not really know. To repeat the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, made, it is not possible to determine how many investigations there have been that relate to women, including women acting in relation to their pregnancy.
Alongside that we have had another major change, about which we have already heard a great deal this evening, in Committee and at Second Reading, and that is the arrival on the scene of abortifacient pills. They have completely changed the profile of abortion, including whether the foetus is dead before it is delivered. It is not just about telemedicine but about pills by post, which have become much more easily available, not simply within this country but increasingly across country boundaries.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, and others have discussed consultations by pregnant women, and we have had some discussion of whether these should or should not all be in person. Our Amendment 426C has a rather different focus. It would create a new crime of obtaining abortifacients, which for the moment are pills, by false representation. To explain why this is desirable, I will say a bit more about the case of Stuart Worby, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, referred.
In 2025, Stuart Worby was found guilty of poisoning his pregnant wife by administering abortion medication without her knowledge or consent. She very much wanted the baby she was carrying and he did not. A female associate of Worby’s procured the drugs through an online consultation in which she claimed early pregnancy and was duly prescribed and sent the pills. Worby gave his wife the drugs without her knowledge. She suffered a devastating miscarriage and the government website summarising the case notes that she is left unable to bear children. The victim of Worby’s act was not investigated when she miscarried. The crime came to light only when she found messages on her husband’s phone and went to the police.
In another recent case in Scotland the abortion was procured by a paramedic who injected his partner without her knowledge. Again, she was not investigated; the crime only came to light indirectly. There may be many other cases like this, but it is possible and becoming easier to obtain these pills—