Abortion legislation is “very much out of date” and should be overhauled, the chair of the Commons women and equalities committee has said, after a woman was jailed for procuring drugs to induce an abortion after the legal limit.
There was outrage on Monday after the woman, a mother of three, was sentenced to more than two yearsin prison.
She received the medication under the “pills by post” scheme, which was introduced during the Covid pandemic for unwanted pregnancies up to 10 weeks, after a remote consultation.
The woman, 44, pleaded guilty in March under the Offences Against the Person Act, legislation that dates back to 1861, and will serve half of her 28-month sentence in custody and the remaining under licence. She had originally pleaded not guilty to a charge of an offence of child destruction.
Caroline Nokes, a Conservative MP, said the judge in the case indicated he had believed there was a clear case for parliament to reconsider legislation surrounding abortion.
“I think he has a valid point. This is not something that has been debated in any great detail for many years now,” she told Radio 4’s World Tonight programme on Monday.
“And cases like this, although are tragic and thankfully very rare, throw into sharp relief that we are relying on legislation that is very out of date. It makes a case for parliament to start looking at this issue in detail.”
The number of women and girls facing police investigations and the threat of life imprisonment under abortion laws has risen over the past three years, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS).
In 2022, a woman who used abortion medication in a failed attempt to end her own pregnancy was reported to the police by her medical team.
Commenting on the latest case, Amnesty International said it “underscores the desperate need for legal reform in relation to reproductive health”.
Chiara Capraro, the women’s human rights programme director at Amnesty International UK, said: “It is shocking – and quite frankly terrifying – that in 2023 a woman in the UK has been sentenced to jail because of a law dating back to 1861.”
Prosecutors said the woman had knowingly misled the BPAS by saying she was below the 10-week cutoff, when she believed she was about 28 weeks pregnant.
Doctors later concluded the foetus was from 32 to 34 weeks’ gestation (between seven and eight months) at the time of termination. In England, Scotland and Wales, abortion is generally legal up to 24 weeks but is carried out in a hospital or clinic after 10 weeks.
Stoke-on-Trent crown court heard how the woman discovered she was pregnant in December 2019 before arranging a telephone consultation with BPAS in May 2020.
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