Carla Lockhart

I thank all those who have contributed to the debate today. My views differ from many who have spoken, and I concur with my hon. Friend the Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who outlined our case extremely well. For me, this is a debate on life. I believe that both lives matter in every pregnancy. The most basic human right is the right to life. I speak today with deep conviction on this issue, and a desire to restore life-affirming laws to this entire United Kingdom—laws that protect the most vulnerable in our society. It is important to outline that since the 1967 Act was brought into force in the United Kingdom, 10 million abortions have taken place. One baby is lost to abortion every two and a half minutes; that is 26 lives every hour—and this debate will last three hours. That is stark. I come at this issue from the perspective of life and the protection of life. In every pregnancy, both lives matter. There are times in politics when one does not enjoy being right. Back in 2021, I wrote in The House magazine of my fears that the pills-by-post scheme for at-home abortions was leading to an increase in medical complications, dangerous late abortions and coerced abortions. Plenty of others expressed similar fears. Sadly, those fears have all proven to be true. A study based on freedom of information requests to NHS trusts found that more than 10,000 women who took at least one abortion pill, provided by the NHS, at home in 2020 needed hospital treatment for side effects—equivalent to more than one in 17 women, or 20 women per day. Late last year, Stuart Worby was convicted of using abortion pills obtained by a third party through the pills-by-post scheme to induce an abortion of a woman against her knowledge or will. All those cases could have been prevented if abortion providers had not lobbied, in the face of warnings about precisely those kinds of incidents occurring, for the removal of in-person appointments where health risks could be assessed and the woman’s identity and gestational age accurately verified. It is that last point about ensuring that a woman’s gestational age is accurately verified that has indirectly led to the debate we are having today. The abortion lobby has acknowledged—I quote Jonathan Lord, former medical director for abortion provider Marie Stopes—that until recently, “only three women” had “ever been on trial over the past 160 years” for illegal abortions. Since then, there has been an increase in investigations and prosecutions, albeit still a very small number in the light of the more than a quarter of a million abortions we now have every year in the United Kingdom—a national tragedy. Why has there been a small rise in prosecutions? It is surely not because the CPS or police have suddenly decided to handle the issue in a more draconian way; rather, the pills-by-post scheme has enabled women, either dishonestly or because they have miscalculated their gestational age, to obtain abortion pills beyond the 10-week limit when at-home abortions are legal and considered safe for women—they are, of course, never safe for the baby—and even beyond the 24-week upper time limit for abortions in this country. Tragically, that has led to viable babies’ lives being ended. The responsibility for that surely lies with those who lobbied for the pills-by-post scheme. What is the solution? Well, it cannot be to make matters worse by decriminalising abortion. That would be highly irresponsible, creating conditions where a woman could perform her own abortion, unsupervised, without any legal deterrent, away from a clinical setting, at a stage in pregnancy when doing so would carry great risks and when her baby would be viable. We would be de facto introducing abortion up to birth and reintroducing dangerous backstreet abortions. That is not pro-women, and it renders the time limit redundant in a context where pills can be obtained without any reliable in-person gestational age check. There is a clear alternative solution: end the pills-by-post scheme and reinstate in-person consultations. Polling published by The Telegraph last year found that more than half of the public agreed that it should remain the case that a woman is breaking the law if she has an abortion of a healthy baby between the current 24-week legal time limit and birth; only 16% disagreed. The public does not support decriminalisation. Only 1% support abortion up to birth, which such proposals would introduce by the removal of offences prohibiting women from performing their own abortion at any stage. Polling has found that 71% of women support a return to in-person appointments, with only 9% in favour of continuing with the scheme. Decriminalisation is a convenient way to cover up the disastrous consequences of the pills-by-post scheme. I greatly fear that, just as my earlier warnings about the scheme have sadly proven true, if decriminalisation were introduced my warnings today would also come true and more women would take abortion pills away from a clinical context late in pregnancy, endangering their lives and leading to the tragic deaths of viable unborn babies. Permitting that would be profoundly irresponsible. Ideology would be trumping women’s safety. One final comment: I have rarely witnessed anything as cynical and disingenuous as the argument, put forward by its supporters, that decriminalisation would allow women in England and Wales to have the same so-called rights as women in Northern Ireland. When the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) hijacked the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Act 2019 to impose abortion on Northern Ireland without democratic consent, she seemed to have no problem at all with the law in England and Wales, bemoaning how women in Northern Ireland were being discriminated against because they did not have access to the same law. She then, however, helped to introduce an even more extreme law for Northern Ireland than what we have here in England and Wales, and now cynically uses that more extreme law to argue that it is women in England and Wales who are now being discriminated against, despite the fact they can access abortions up to almost six months of pregnancy, essentially on demand. In my mind, that is politics of the lowest kind. What is not often recognised is that introducing decriminalisation here would not bring abortion practice in England and Wales into line with Northern Ireland, because of this key difference: there is no pills-by-post scheme in Northern Ireland. It is the combination of the pills-by-post scheme, whereby women can obtain abortion pills without reliable checks for gestational age, health risks or coercion, while also removing any deterrent against women performing their own abortions right up to birth, that would make decriminalisation so dangerous and so irresponsible for the Government. I hope my warnings will not go unheeded this time.