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Depopulation agenda marches forward: UK House of Lords passes legislation legalising DIY abortion up to and during birth

RHODA WILSON

On Wednesday, the UK House of Lords voted to approve a clause in the Crime and Policing Bill that removes criminal liability for women who self-induce abortions at any stage of pregnancy, including up to and during birth.

This decision, passed by 185 votes to 148, means that women in England and Wales will no longer face prosecution for performing their own abortions, regardless of gestational age or reason – such as sex-selective termination.

Clause 208 of the Crime and Policing Bill, originally introduced in the House of Commons by Labour Member of Parliament (“MP”) Tonia Antoniazzi, was debated in the Commons in June 2025 for only 46 minutes and passed with 379 MPs for and 137 MPs against.

The House of Lords’ vote on Wednesday followed a failed attempt by Baroness Rosa Monckton to remove the clause entirely. The change does not alter the current 24-week legal limit for abortion but eliminates criminal sanctions for self-induced terminations beyond that point.

Critics, including Christian groups and other pro-life groups like Right to Life and Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (“SPUC”), argue the Bill passed by the Lords undermines safeguards, increases risks to women’s health and could lead to more late-term abortions, including of viable babies.

When the Bill was passed through the House of Commons in June 2025, Catholic Archbishop John Sherrington said, “New Clause 1 lifts any criminal liability for women performing their abortions for any reason, at any time … Women will be even more vulnerable to manipulation, coerced and forced abortions. This legal change will also discourage medical consultation and make the use of abortion pills for dangerous late-term, at-home abortions more likely.”

“New Clause 1” was renumbered Clause 191 while passing through the legislative process in the House of Commons.

Last month, Right to Life warned that Clause 191 “would change the law so it would no longer be illegal for women to perform their own abortions for any reason, including sex-selective purposes, and at any point up to and during birth, likely leading to a significant increase in the number of women performing dangerous late-term abortions at home.”

Clause 191 was renumbered to Clause 208 during the House of Lords’ Report Stage.

Ahead of the vote in the House of Lords, Archbishop Sherrington said, “Apart from the further threat Clause 208 poses to the lives of unborn babies and the health of their mothers, this change would leave women more susceptible to coercion and abuse.”

Michael Robinson, Executive Director of SPUC, said, “These profound changes to the Abortion Act are being pushed through without any pre-legislative scrutiny, public consultation or a detailed impact assessment … those supporting these changes have done so based on ideology and without a proper understanding of their adverse effects.”

Former Health Minister Maria Caulfield warned that the change would mean “infanticide … would become possible with no legal consequence,” adding that “our society will be damaged and its moral credibility greatly diminished.”

The Lords also voted to reject an amendment by Baroness Philippa Stroud to reinstate in-person consultations with a doctor to be able to receive abortion pills. “A return to such appointments, removed during [covid] lockdown, would have better protected against women taking the pills after the ten-week limit which they are designed for,” The Christian Institute said.

Adding, “Abortion pills are not supposed to be used beyond very early stages, but the current ‘pills-by-post’ scheme allows women easy access to the drugs regardless of their child’s gestational age.”

The pills-by-post scheme is not only deadly to babies. SPUC’s Robinson highlighted an example of the serious harm to the mother that the state-sanctioned, self-administered, home abortion scheme poses.

“We know that the ‘pills by post’ policy has led to a massive increase in 999 calls and ambulance call-outs, at the same time removing the important safeguard of a face-to-face discussion with a doctor,” he said.

“As one peer pointed out, the lack of this vital protection was brought sharply into focus during the Worby Case. This was where Stuart Worby used a female friend to obtain abortion drugs using telemedicine. He later used these to cause his partner to abort their child. The side effects of this action were so bad that the victim will never be able to have a child of her own.”

Referring to the House of Lords’ vote on 18 March, Right to Life said, “While the result tonight is tragic, we want you to know it is incredibly important that we fight on.”

Polling shows only 1% of Britons support abortion up to birth, with 89% of the public and 91% of women opposing it.

“Another poll shows that more than half of the general public agrees that it should remain the case that a woman is breaking the law if she has an abortion of a healthy baby after the current 24-week legal time limit up until birth. Only 16% disagreed,” Life News said.

A poll commissioned by SPUC in 2024 showed that the public did not back decriminalisation of abortion. “When presented with the facts of what the change [to the Crime and Policing Bill] actually meant, support plummeted to just one in eight,” Robinson said.

Strong public opposition to Clause 208 continues to this day. Life News noted that “the introduction of the clause to the Crime and Policing Bill caused a major backlash, which included 91% of 28,000 respondents to a poll run by The Telegraph saying they were opposed to the extreme law change that would be introduced by clause 208.”

Simon Calvert, deputy director of The Christian Institute, said, “It is unutterably grim that the House of Lords has voted to permit a woman to take the life of her baby just days before birth.”

“They have shown little regard for public feeling which is strongly opposed to this. They have dehumanised the unborn to a shocking new degree. And they have abandoned women,” he said.

The Bill now proceeds to Royal Assent, where it may become law. If enacted, it will represent one of the most significant changes to UK abortion law since 1967.

“What happens in the UK rarely stays there,” New Zealand’s Family First said.

“New Zealand decriminalised abortion in 2020, allowing terminations up to 20 weeks on request and beyond in certain cases. Our abortion numbers have risen sharply (by around 37% from pre-law figures, reaching over 17,700 in 2024), coinciding with expanded telehealth access. The same ideological momentum that propelled Clause 208 through Westminster is already echoing in policy discussions here in New Zealand.”

This article (Depopulation agenda marches forward: UK House of Lords passes legislation legalising DIY abortion up to and during birth) was created and published by The Expose and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Rhoda Wilson

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Killing babies is fine now?

NEIL O’BRIEN

Last night the House of Lords voted for an amendment which will decriminalise self-induced abortions all the way up the point of birth. So you will be able to kill a baby the day before it is about to be born, and face no legal consequences.

This is monstrous.

There is no magic that happens as you pass down the birth canal. There is no flash of light as your soul descends. There is no moral difference whatsoever between a baby the day before birth, and a baby a day after.

The thought that someone could poison or smash up the body of a baby and face no legal consequences is appalling. That’s an overused word these days so let me try again. The thought should make you sick.

Advocates for this appalling change play silly word games, but if the law banning late abortions is no longer enforced, it effectively won’t exist.

And everyone knows what is coming next. This amendment will result in horrific amateur home abortions. Some will be forced on women by men. But either way it will be horrific. And then the same people who advocated for this will then say we should “tidy up” the mess they made and allow the same things to happen in clinical settings too.

This is not even being done as a stand-alone new law, but as an amendment tacked on to the Crime and Policing Bill which the government originally said is intended to “protect the public and our town centres from antisocial behaviour, retail crime and shop theft”.

There have been no impact assessments, no public consultation, and almost no public debate. Polling shows people are overwhelmingly against abortion up to the day of birth. There were just 45 minutes of backbench debate on it in the Commons. But the law will be changed anyway.

The people pushing this – like Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Tonia Antoniazzi, are perfectly clear about where they stand. All conversations end in thought-terminating slogans, like: “my body my choice”. But this is nonsense. Yes, it is your body, but it also someone else’s body too. What about their rights?

Antoniazzi is at least perfectly clear. Times Radio host, Stig Abell asked her: “Any woman could end a pregnancy at any time, 35 weeks, 36 weeks, 37 weeks, without committing an offence. And you are comfortable with that?” Tonia replied: “Yes I am.”

Now, up to a point these things are debatable. When do you become a person? At the moment of conception? Or when you begin to think and feel, mid-way through pregnancy? Until last night the law had settled, uneasily, on the latter. But no one was pretending that full term babies were not people with rights. Until now.

One irony is that the government originally said that the Crime and Policing Bill would also “tackle the epidemic of… violence against women and girls that stains our society”.

Violence against girls? Now you can kill a baby girl and face no consequence. Perhaps your husband doesn’t want a girl. Unlucky her to have been dealt the wrong chromosome. The reason you kill the baby doesn’t matter, there will be no penalty.

Would this happen? It already is doing. The NHS says that there is clear evidence that sex-selective abortions are happening already in some communities.

None of this is abstract. In 2012 Sarah Catt was jailed for killing a baby at 39 weeks. The court said she took a “cold, calculated” decision for her own convenience and self-interest. She took pills at 39 weeks and gave birth, and never revealed where the body was. The court said she had a history of deceit and concealment. The judge said she did it because she thought the man with whom she was having an affair was the father.

From now on, that will be absolutely fine. There will be no prosecution for doing this.

* * * * * *

Most bad things happen not because people are like: “yay, let’s do something terrible”, but because we do what human beings are best at – we look the other way.

From the holocaust to the mass inhumane treatment of animals, people look the other way.

I am no exception. I wonder how much of the meat I have eaten in my life was raised in conditions of grotesque cruelty? I have never marched to stop the war, although several of our recent wars have brought nothing but utter disaster. And I have generally tried to stay out of the abortion debate. I would rather not think about it.

But this is now ridiculous. Murdering people is bad, and there is no debate that these babies who can now be killed are people, just like you and me.

Am I not a man and a brother? I am not a religious person, but I do think killing babies is bad.

Never mind the fact that they can think and feel. They can live. These days three in ten babies born at 22 weeks will survive. By 26 weeks it is 80 percent – and rising.

* * * * *

While they were at it last night, the Lords also voted to keep abortion pills-by-post, and rejected plans to return to requiring a medical assessment to prevent coercion.

We already know that this is being abused by bad men. In December 2024, Stuart Worby was jailed after spiking a woman’s drink and ending the life of her unborn child at 15 weeks gestation using abortion pills obtained through the pills-by-post scheme.

We also know pills-by-post is causing real problems. A FOI request in 2022 to six ambulance services found a 64% increase in ambulance call-outs from women concerned after taking abortion pills. A study found that 10,000 women, or 1 in 17, of those who took abortion pills at home prescribed by the NHS, required hospital treatment in 2020.

* * * * *

In January new data showed that the number of abortions in England and Wales had risen to a record high in 2023 – a 10% increase on the previous year. That brought the total to just under 300,000 a year across the UK – equivalent to the population of a city the size of Leicester every year.

Number of abortions, residents of England and Wales, 1969 to 2023

Someone said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and as rare as possible”, but it is no longer rare. We are close to one abortion for every two births.

I have written before about offering more support to people who want to have children. But it isn’t the number of people that conceive that has gone down. Compared to 1968 we have a quarter fewer births, but actually more conceptions. Abortion makes up the difference.

.
When I look at the charts above, I think of the lines from Andrew Young that I quoted at the top.

It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

300,000 people a year never get to be born. More than ten million lives have been ended this way since 1967.

They could have lived, but will never get to see the sun rise, never taste ice-cream and never feel a hug.

Left alone they would have mainly grown and lived. But they had no voice, and we took that all away from them.

The clinching argument in the 1960s for the legalisation of abortion was to avoid “back street” and home abortions.

But now the advocates of further liberalisation are backing DIY abortions in order to push on with their agenda: pills by post with no checks, and no prosecution for late abortions as long as you do it yourself and no clinician is involved.

This will lead to disasters and then the advocates of it will come back for more.

I voted against these changes and will vote to repeal them if I get a chance.

I don’t have many original thoughts to add to this long-running and emotive debate.

But one thing I think is missing is this.

There are loads of people who would like to adopt a baby. Particularly among those who cannot have children – which is a growing group as we all delay having kids.

The number of people who would adopt a baby is larger than those who would adopt or foster grown children. The people who take on bigger children are heroes and deserve medals.

But there are many people who don’t feel able to do this, but are longing for children and would adopt a baby. Meanwhile there are women who are pregnant and don’t feel they can bring up a child.

There must be a way to solve one problem with the other? To offer people the support they need to have a baby and a home for him or her to live in and be loved in? Shouldn’t people be given that choice and offered the help to make it?

People say that every child should be a wanted child, but there are many people who want and don’t have. My former colleague Michael Gove recalls how his adoptive mother told him: “You didn’t grow under my heart, you grew in it”.

I know quite a few people who had the same love from an adoptive parent.

I think we have massively lost our way here. There are lots of things that are complicated, but killing babies is wrong.

There are lots of people who were on the road to life, but will never get to live. But they have no voice and we – including me – don’t like to think about it. So we look the other way.

That’s got to change.

This article (Killing babies is fine now?) was created and published by Neil O’Brien and is republished here under “Fair Use”