ISSUES
: Abortion
Chapter 2: Abortion debate
25
Why it is time to decriminalise abortion
T
his week the British Pregnancy
Advisory Service launched the
We Trust Women campaign
to remove abortion from the criminal
law across the UK. We believe it is
both absurd and offensive that in the
21st century a woman in this country
could be imprisoned for ending
her pregnancy without the legal
authorisation of two doctors under
legislation passed before women
could vote. We want the removal of
sections 58 and 59 of the Offences
Against the Person Act, which call
for a woman who induces her own
miscarriage to face life imprisonment,
alongside anyone who assists her.
Our campaign is supported by many
women’s organisations, including
the Royal College of Midwives, the
Fawcett Society, the Family Planning
Association and theWomen’s Equality
Party.
The 1967 act did not remove those
offending sections of theOAPA; rather,
it stipulated that a woman would not
be prosecuted if two doctors agreed
she met certain conditions. That
act was pioneering and profoundly
important – yet it was not the triumph
of the women’s rights movement
as it is often perceived to be, but a
response to the growing public health
problem of backstreet abortions.
It placed decision-making firmly in
the hands of doctors as to whether
a woman would suffer as a result of
continuing her pregnancy, painting
women’s agency almost completely
out of the picture.
Decriminalising
abortion
would
change everything – and nothing. It
would not increase the number of
women needing abortion services
or the gestation at which they are
carried out, as has been shown in
countries where abortion has been
decriminalised. Abortion is already
tightly regulated in the same way
as other healthcare procedures,
with staff bound by professional
guidelines. This has nothing to do with
abortion law.
But it would reflect much more
accurately the way in which we see
women today. It would put women
needing abortion care on the same
legal footing as any person requiring
medical care – not asking for
permission to make a decision about
their own body but in partnership
with their care provider. As a film to
accompany the campaign highlights,
it would be a marker of just how far
women have come since 1861.
And there are important practical
improvements that decriminalisation
would bring. The law has held back
clinical improvements in care that
have benefitted women in other
countries, in particular the ability to
use certain medications at home for
early terminations after they have
been prescribed by a doctor – as is
recommended by the World Health
Organization. We also know the
threat of prosecution that is unique
to abortion puts doctors off entering
this field of women’s healthcare. On a
regular basis, pregnant women with
complex medical needs whose health
conditions mean they must be treated
in a hospital setting rather than a
community clinic are compelled to
continue an unwanted pregnancy
because they cannot find doctors
willing or able to help them. These
pregnancies can put their health
seriously at risk.
Campaigners who want to change
the law are encouraged by a ruling
the supreme court handed down in
the case of babies with anencephaly
in 2012. This is a condition where
the foetus develops without a brain,
making it impossible for the baby to be
born alive. The case took eight years,
but eventually the court voted eight to
two in favour of making abortion legal
in those circumstances.
Before the ruling, there were two
exceptions to the ban on termination
in Brazil – when the pregnant woman’s
life was at risk and when she had been
raped. Anencephaly became the third,
but campaigners acknowledge that it
is not a simple precedent.
Debora Diniz, co-founder of Anis and
professor of law at the University
of Brasilia, said she was confident
the court would understand that
the situation is an emergency. They
were not asking for the legalisation of
abortion, she said, but “to have the
right to abortion in the case of Zika
infection during the epidemic”.
“It is not an abortion in the case of
foetal malformation. It is the right to
abortion in case of being infected
by the Zika virus, suffering mental
stress because you have this horrible
situation and so few answers on how
to plan and have a safe pregnancy,”
she said.
Campaigners have five demands:
good information for women in
pregnancy, improvements in access
to family planning, giving women
mosquito repellents, better social
policies to help children born with
birth defects because of Zika and
financial support for parents.
Diniz points out that the worst hit are
the poor. “The feeling in my well-to-
do neighbourhood [in Brasilia] is that
everything is fine,” she said. People
have never met a woman with Zika or
seen a baby with neurological defects.
But when she goes to clinics in hard-
hit areas such as Campina Grande in
the north-east, everything revolves
around Zika.
“We have two countries in one
country,” she said. “This is an
emergency of unknown women.
The trouble is they were unknown
before the epidemic. I’m not being
an opportunist. We have an epidemic
and the epidemic shows the face of
Brazilian inequality.”
19 July 2016
Ö
The above information is
reprinted with kind permission
from
The Guardian
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