British abortion law is a medieval nightmare | Zoe Williams
WWhen it emerged last year that six women had been prosecuted in Britain for having abortions, it was little more than a blip: in one year it was twice as many women as had been brought to court in the previous 160 years combined . Behind these cases, of course, are an unknown number of women who have been investigated but acquitted, so their phones have been confiscated, they have been denied contact with their children, they have been interrogated with the possibility of life imprisonment if they had just been caught. had a miscarriage. All of these women were living, if not their worst, then certainly their most medieval nightmare, and some are living it right now.
The natural question was: what the hell was going on? Had the police gone mad? (When the Guardian asked a force about its actions last year, it decided to lie about it, which surprised me.) Was the Director of Public Prosecutions anti-abortion? (Max Hill KC declined to comment.) Were clinicians suffering from some kind of group amnesia around patient confidentiality? (The police usually only intervene if they are warned by a doctor or midwife.) That’s all still possible, but when I spoke to the campaign organization Doctors for choice, it showed the kind of pragmatism you look for in a doctor. Don’t worry about pointing fingers: change the law. Abortion should not be in the criminal code at all. Life imprisonment is the harshest punishment for illegal abortion in the world, giving England and Wales the dubious distinction of being harsher than Syria, Poland, Texas and South Sudan.
Doctors, midwives, nurses and students are launching a campaign this week – a protest outside the Old Bailey, posters on buses – in support of an amendment to the criminal justice bill, which will be voted on at the end of this month. And again, you’ve got to hand it to the medics who caused this: given their pay cuts, high student debt, bizarre hostility from ministers and crazy hours, you’d think they’d have enough on their plate.
Abortion legislation in much of Britain is an arcane solution from 1967, which you may not seriously consider until you seek an abortion. Considering that one in three British women will do that at some point, that’s a lot of people who have been in this objectively comical position: you have to get two doctors to sign off on the fact that the pregnancy poses a serious, permanent threat to health . your mental health. Theoretically, you have to pretend to be crazy, and they have to pretend to believe you, to carry out what will plausibly be, besides dropping geography at GCSE, the wisest decision of your life. I remember being genuinely unclear about what this situation would require: Would a simple “yes” to the compromised mental health question be enough, or would I also have to rip my clothes and make nervous breakdown noises?
Just a yes was fine, but it was clear that the law was infantilizing by removing my agency and handing it over to two doctors who didn’t want it. Let’s be clear: who cared? It was the end of the 20th century, when all arcs leaned towards justice and legal anomalies were just boring parliamentary debates that had not yet been had. The great gynecologist and campaigner Wendy Savage would sometimes tell us on panels that we needed to wise up and fight a little harder. But overall we were pretty polite about it. And now it’s thirty years later, and she’s 88, and she’ll be speaking about this week’s protest, and—not wanting to put words in her mouth—I imagine she’ll say a more elegant version of, “Holy shit, y’all – the arc is everywhere, and now you really need to wise up and fight a little harder.
Don’t wait to find out who is leading these prosecutions; don’t wait until the first conviction is handed down using period tracker data; don’t wait to see if the US, by rolling back reproductive rights, was an outlier or a harbinger: fight for decriminalization now, because staying civil has gotten us exactly nowhere.