On Tuesday evening, the House of Commons voted, by a very comfortable margin, in favour of an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that on becoming law will remove any criminal liability for women terminating their own pregnancies for any reason, at any time up to birth.
An unborn child in the womb
People providing assistance for late-term abortions for non-medical reasons will still be liable for prosecution – which looks very much like a recognition that a child in the womb has a right not to be killed. (At least, unless they are a Down’s child, in which case they enjoy no such protection.) But there is no such protection for a child from being aborted by their own mother. As Ruth Gledhill reports in the Tablet magazine this week, a “deeply alarmed” Archbishop of Liverpool John Sherrington said immediately after the vote, “This decision significantly reduces the protection of unborn lives and will result in grave harm for pregnant women. 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.”
The Commons vote followed a series of difficult cases where women had been arrested for illegal abortion offences. In 2023, after the Court of Appeal reduced the sentence of Carla Foster, who had been imprisoned for illegally obtaining abortion tablets to end her pregnancy after 32-34 weeks, John Sherrington said, “I welcome the court’s decision to show mercy and compassion so that Carla Foster is reunited with her children and her family life can continue.”
He added, “I reiterate the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church that both the mother and the unborn child should be afforded the protection of the law and that abortion is always a tragedy for all concerned. It is important that the law which protects the life of the unborn child is upheld.”
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There is likely to be another contentious vote in the Commons tomorrow, when the debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is expected to reach its crucial stage. The buzz word that has been doing the rounds in the debate about assisted suicide (aka assisted dying) is “autonomy”. What right does society have to tell a terminally ill person of sound mind that they are not free to choose the time of their own death, in order to avoid pain and indignity? It’s a reasonable question. In an editorial in the print issue this week The Tablet looks at some of the implications of the bill being passed.
At stake is the relationship between the person who is terminally ill (which, of course, we all will be one day) and the state, the health care professionals who are treating them, and their family and loved ones. If this patient in a hospital ward may lawfully request a fatal dose, then so may that patient in the bed opposite. That patient will know that henceforth their suffering is something they have chosen to endure. Their suffering will become self-inflicted. They are henceforth volunteers in suffering, authors of their own misfortune. If medically-assisted suicide becomes an option, a worm of doubt will be introduced into the compassion felt for the sick and dying by carers and even by loved ones – and it’s easy to imagine that those who are elderly or dying or in need of long-term medical assistance may experience a tincture of guilt at the trouble they are now choosing to cause.
In a feature that presses on some assumptions about compassion, Michael W. Higgins reflects on the testimonies of four writers, Donald Nicholl, Michael Paul Gallagher, Daniel O’Leary and Richard Gaillardetz, whose notes and diaries as they approached their deaths challenge our suppositions about autonomy, suffering and authentic living and dying.