MPs have opened the door to infanticide

Spectator

18-06-2025

Well, it's hello to prenatal infanticide now that Tonia Antoniazzi's amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill has passed the Commons after all of two hours' debate with 379 MPs voting in favour. Can we get our heads round what that means? Nothing a woman does in relation to her own pregnancy can make her liable to prosecution. At the same age of gestation when premature babies are admitted to neonatal wards with a very good chance of survival, less fortunate foetuses can be killed with impunity by their own mothers. So anyone like Carla Foster, who aborted her baby Lily at 32 weeks' gestation, will now get off free. There are, in other words, no sanctions for those who kill a foetus at any time right up to birth, so long as it's your own foetus you're killing.
Are we meant to think that women in these situations are always desperate, never motivated by malice, never out for revenge, never callous or cruel or casual about unborn life? Are we, in short, denying women moral responsibility for their actions?
Are we meant to think that women in these situations are always desperate, never motivated by malice, never out for revenge, never callous or cruel or casual about unborn life? Are we, in short, denying women moral responsibility for their actions? Looks like it to me.
Can we remind ourselves of the main reason we're in this position? It's a Covid thing, obviously. Prior to the pandemic, women had to turn up to a clinic or surgery to obtain abortifacients and there it was possible for a reasonably experienced midwife or nurse to assess the stage of gestation – if you were over six months' pregnant, it'd be obvious, probably at a glance. But when Covid meant travelling to clinics was tricky, the Conservative government allowed for abortion pills to be prescribed remotely and sent by post. It's just a matter of the woman's word about how far advanced the pregnancy is; no one can check. And that's how Carla Foster got her pills; she didn't tell the truth about the stage of gestation she was at.
The reintroduction of in-person appointments would have done away with the main way of procuring the abortifacients for this dangerous procedure – and that was the gist of another amendment by the Tory Caroline Johnson, but the same number of MPs who voted for impunity for killing viable foetuses voted against that one.
Let's also remind ourselves how abortion pills work: the first is a progesterone blocker, which breaks down the lining of the uterus to kill the foetus; the second induces labour. So if the foetus is lucky enough to survive the first pill, it could be born alive thanks to the second. What are the chances it might be rushed to a neonatal ward? Nil, wouldn't you say? And let's not deceive ourselves about the distress of the foetus in these circumstances. You can get foetal stress responses earlier than 24 weeks (one reason why the abortion time limit should be pushed back); when surgery is performed on wanted foetuses between 20-26 weeks' gestation they are routinely given the benefit of pain relief. The foetus dying in the womb when abortifacients intended for use up to ten weeks' gestation are used at six months will suffer… there is no avoiding that reality.
What gets me about all this is not just the infantilising of women, who are moral agents in all this (unless they're being coerced, which is certainly a possibility in this unscrutinised, unchallengeable situation); it's the cognitive dissonance. It's the case in every abortion that a foetus who in one scenario gets a lovely picture taken of its little fingers and toes at the 12-week ultrasound, can in another, be done away with in the course of 'abortion healthcare'. But it's the same entity. A foetus doesn't become human just because it's wanted, you know; it is what it is, a prenatal human being. It doesn't spring into being as a baby because that's what its mother calls it.
And if that's true of the foetus in the first trimester – the average cut off point for most legal abortions in Europe – it's even more obviously the case for the foetus from six to nine months' gestation. If it looks like a baby, reacts like a baby, feels pain like a baby, then you know, it might be worth considering the possibility that it is a baby, just one that hasn't had the chance to be born. It's sentient all right, and viable given proper care. But somehow the MPs who blithely signed away the right to protection under the law for these unfortunates can't see that the mother is not the only life in the balance here. And giving impunity for women who terminate late term pregnancies can only make this grisly scenario more likely.
What's needed in fact, is for a tightening of the abortion laws, not making them meaningless. It's legal to abort up to six months' gestation…which is ridiculous given, as mentioned earlier, foetal rates of survival in neonatal wards. I'd at least halve it to 12 weeks with only medical emergencies justifying later abortions.
As for Tonia's insistence that the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 – exceptions to which were made in the 1967 abortion act – is being 'used against vulnerable women and girls', well, it covers all sorts of offences, including grievous bodily harm, and there's no sign of that going out of fashion.
My own response to this shaming, repugnant development would be to scrutinise the list of the MPs who voted for this grisly amendment, and if they include your constituency MP, I'd say vote for anyone, literally anyone, else at the next election.