MPs vote to end prosecution for late term abortion

Yank religious lobbyists not getting what they want. Lovely.

I’m so happy about this, fuck getting arrested for what happens inside of my own god damn body.

Abortion is never great, no one goes into it without deep emotional struggles, it should not be a criminal offence to police your own body

Nah, I’m as pro abortion as they come and this is a bad thing.

Surely, at some point, the foetus is able to survive on its own, and therefore has a reasonable right to life, and indeed care by it’s providers? How can a mother take planned, deliberate actions to end her foetus’ life and garner sympathy, but do the same thing potentially 24 hours later and be a heinous baby murderer? Also, what about the rights of the father – in an instance at, say 8 months, where many babies are born naturally anyways, and the mother chooses to end the foetus’ life, does the father have no rights, no choice, no ability to have justice for a life that may be snatched away from him mere days/weeks from it all?

I get that current abortion laws are outdated and needs reworking. Have the argument for when a foetus can be reasonably considered alive, have the argument about medical complications, or DV or whatever – I’m no doctor and don’t really have an educated view on the matter. But to assume all late stage terminations are where the mother is a victim is nuts. Otherwise we should apply that same rationale to other crimes as well.

As usual, women are somehow described as the victims in their own criminal actions. The woman who was on trial last year deliberately chose to investigate late stage abortion. She deliberately misled medical personnel because she knew it was wrong. If the intent of a thing is bad and it is a bad action…when does it count as a crime?

Hmmm. On the one hand, there is a point where abortion becomes nothing more than killing a baby, with the only distinction being an arbitrary line. On the other, abortion is already implicitly recognised to be separate from murder in that there are defences to abortion which are not available to the offence of murder. You cannot excuse yourself from murder because the person you killed would have suffered “such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”, or because of the risk of grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. So the law treats abortion as a medical procedure, and there is a separate offence of procuring an abortion, as opposed to considering it to be murder.

People saying this is a bad thing boggle the mind. Do you really think a system that forces women to have children (yes, even if it’s late stage) under threat of criminal sanction is the one thing that’s stopping them? And even if it is, is that a good thing? A person who’s eight months pregnant going “oh, I would have aborted this fetus but I guess I could get prosecuted so I won’t”. Throwing women in prison for this and prosecuting them doesn’t really seem like it’s in the public interest. Especially when if a parent doesn’t want their kid, that can lead to big issues down the line, potentially in the care system and elsewhere. What public interest is being served here?

EDIT: Also seen some good points around people needing support and the like if they’re trying to/aborting that late, not criminal sanctions, and I agree.

I’m going to get downvoted and called a Puritan, a religious nutjob, and every other name under the sun, but I will say this anyway. How are people celebrating this? This law means a woman can abort a fetus up to the point of birth and not get prosecuted! Even when the fetus can survive on its own and is near-indistinguishable from a newborn. I mean, what difference really is there between a fetus one hour before birth and a baby one hour after birth? This is vile and should not be celebrated.