Yesterday (June 17), British MPs voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. The amendment, put forward by Welsh Labour politician Tonia Antoniazzi, advocated for a change in the government’s crime and policing bill: to remove “women from criminal law related to abortion” and would mean “no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy”.

The amendment passed with a free vote of MPs, with 379 voting in favour and 137 voting against it. It came after growing calls for a change in abortion law as over 100 people have been investigated by police on suspicion of illegally ending a pregnancy since 2018. Some of these people were arrested from their hospital beds and sentenced to prison. Most recently, 45-year-old Nicola Packer was arrested in a hospital after her abortion in 2020. It took four-and-a-half years for her case to go to court, and last month, she was cleared by a jury.

While the amendment will supposedly remove the “threat of investigation, arrest, prosecution, or imprisonment” of any woman who acts in relation to her own pregnancy, penalties remain for medical professionals and abusive partners who terminate a pregnancy outside the current legal framework. In other words, this amendment has not changed the provisions already set out on abortion care in England and Wales or the laws that govern doctors, nurses and midwives. There will be no change to the 24-week time limit (and in exceptional circumstances beyond), no change to the ten-week limit on telemedicine, and it will still require two doctors’ signatures to be legally provided, among other things.

As Ad’iyah Collective, a pro-abortion collective of doulas who support Muslims and their communities through pregnancy endings, told Dazed, any laws that do not advocate for the full decriminalisation of abortion do not go far enough. “Abortion is the only medical procedure that someone has where two doctors need to sign off on it, and that leaves people open to a lot of potential harm. I recently supported someone who said their reason for wanting an abortion was because they don’t want to have a child, and they were met with a barrier from a practitioner who told them that that was not a ‘valid legal reason’.” They continue: “Only the full decriminalisation, the complete removal of abortion from any form of policing bill and the criminal justice system, is the solution. We need all limits removed when people seek abortion, as early as possible and as late as necessary.”

The changes will not come into law until the bill is passed through the House of Commons and House of Lords and receives royal assent. But it is expected to pass through without issue, given the size of the government’s majority. 

Louise McCudden, UK head of external affairs at MSI Reproductive Choices, has described this as a crucial milestone in the fight for reproductive rights: “At a time when we’re seeing rollbacks on reproductive rights, most notably in the United States, this crucial milestone in the fight for reproductive rights sends a powerful message that our lawmakers are standing up for women.”