As a sign of how low the nation has sunk, political party manifestos in November encouraged the electorate to vote for the right for people to commit murder and not face prosecution.
The Labour Party manifesto stated: ‘We will uphold women’s reproductive rights and decriminalise abortions.’ Such a stance would have meant abortions being regulated like any other medical procedure thus allowing for them to be carried out right the way up to full term.
Ignoring the rights of the unborn to take their first breath, Labour’s Stella Creasy told The Independent: ‘By decriminalising abortion we finally will treat women as capable, breathing citizens.’
The Liberal Democrats committed to decriminalise abortion across the UK while retaining the existing 24-week limit and legislating for access to abortion facilities within Northern Ireland.
The Greens also pledged to ‘extend the EU’s charter of fundamental rights to give women in all EU countries access to legal, safe and affordable abortion services’.
In what appeared an act of ‘thought-crime’ a Liberal Democrat candidate who opposed sex-selective abortion was deselected for holding wrong ‘values’. Rob Flello, the Stoke-on-Trent South candidate was deselected by his party. They said his views ‘diverged’ from the party’s own, but he was selected in another constituency. Flello had voted against same-sex marriage when he was an MP prior to the 2017 election in Stoke.
Alongside this, wrapped up in the guise of ‘rights’, a campaign was launched by abortion provider BPAS, called ‘My pledge, my choice’. Their hope had been to get political candidates to sign their pledge; not a pledge of abstinence, but of being committed to removing any restrictions on abortion, thus allowing abortion up to birth with no reason needing to be given.
A change to the laws around abortion had been due to be tried in Parliament prior to the election being called. The Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill 2017 was a ten-minute rule bill brought forward by Diana Johnson MP (Labour) which sought to fully ‘decriminalise’ abortion by repealing ‘certain criminal offences relating to such terminations’. The radical abortion bill failed to pass at second reading. Labour vowed to rip up Victorian abortion laws by overhauling historic legislation which contains criminal sanctions for women and doctors.
Under the 1967 Abortion Act, women can legally seek a termination up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and each procedure must be signed off by two doctors. However, the previous 19th-century law was never repealed when the Act was brought in, which means it remains a criminal offence to breach these conditions in England and Wales.
