On 17June MPs voted 379 to 137 in favour of an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill which would remove women from the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life Preservation Act 1929 in relation to ending their own pregnancies. This means women would no longer face criminal prosecution for ending a pregnancy after 24 weeks or without the approval of two doctors. It will become law if it remains unamended by the House of Lords in its forthcoming scrutiny of the Bill, which is due to enter a second reading in the Lords, and receives royal assent.
But in order to pass this relatively progressive change to the law, MPs must vote for the obscenely reactionary Crime and Policing Bill within which it has been embedded. This piece of legislation seeks to increase the powers of the violently sexist British police and restrict democratic rights (see ‘Policing Bill: criminalising the working class’, FRFI 305). It includes ‘respect orders’ where police can force individuals to comply with any conditions described in the order without being convicted of a crime and allows the police to raid someone’s property without a warrant if stolen goods have been electronically tracked at that property. Other recent amendments introduce offences for ‘insulting’ behaviours towards emergency workers (which, since 2018, includes police) and trespassing with intent to commit a criminal offence; and facilitate the extraction of more information from online accounts on devices seized by police.
The vote arrived just weeks after a revelation that police forces had been advised to search women’s phones and homes for evidence of a criminal self-induced abortion following ‘suspicious’ miscarriages. At least 100 women have been investigated for having an abortion in the last five years, and six have appeared in court, yet Labour has not meaningfully challenged the laws used to target these women before this point. Abortion should be free on demand and completely decriminalised. Rather than codify abortion as a legal right, Labour ministers are using women’s lives as a political cover to push through draconian legislation. That the decriminalisation of abortion has been attached to further repression of the working class as a whole is evidence the Labour Party has no interest in protecting women.
Annie O’Conner
