When I had an entirely legal abortion, the better part of a decade ago, I felt like a criminal.
On the way out I was accosted by a woman holding a rosary. “It’s not too late,” she said, as I tried to get into a taxi. I kept my fingers crossed that I’d make it home before I started bleeding, and thought how none of this, with the shame and the protesters, felt that different to the back alley stories I’d heard from the 1950s and 1960s.
The drugs were prescribed on the spot by a kind doctor and inserted for me, next to my cervix. At the abortion clinic, I was expected to get them up there myself. The gentle, thoughtful nature of miscarriage care seemed a million miles away from the abortion experience, and it seemed to compound the message that with a miscarriage you’re a victim, but with an abortion, you’re doing something shameful.
The experience of actually passing a pregnancy remains unpleasant, but the circumstances around them are dramatically improved, and like the vote in Westminster yesterday, will help anyone looking to access an abortion feel less like they are doing something wrong.
Richard Tice of Reform UK – which seems inclined to import a US culture war on abortion – posted on X an inflammatory, inaccurate accusation the evening after the vote, which read: “Disgusting. Labour cheered as they voted to become the party of baby killers. SICK.”
square ZING TSJENG Pregnant women are being treated like criminals, with phones seized and homes searched
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The limit at which an abortion is performed remains 24 weeks, and abortions at that late stage remain enormously rare and almost exclusively for medical reasons, as the child is incompatible with life. More than 90 per cent of UK abortions take place in the first 12 weeks.
Under the previous legislation, it was possible that a woman who lost a pregnancy could be investigated and even prosecuted if it was believed that she was actively involved in inducing her own miscarriage.
Relief at a choice made by the powers that be is an unfamiliar but welcome feeling, which staves off my fear that we might have been moving backwards socially. And while I remain worried, more broadly, at the state of the world (and at the prospect of the bill going through the Lords), I am, tentatively, optimistic.
If I weren’t currently pregnant, I would be raising a glass to the brave campaigners who worked so hard to make sure that future generations of women will continue to be able to access essential reproductive health care.
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