Abortion activists are pushing to remove legal protections for the unborn, after a mother was jailed for taking DIY abortion pills when she had been pregnant for around 33 weeks.
Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court found that in 2020 Carla Foster obtained the pills after pretending that she was seven weeks pregnant. She later gave birth to baby Lily who was stillborn.
In Britain, abortion is legal for most reasons up to 24 weeks. Temporary regulations from the coronavirus pandemic allowing women who are less than ten weeks pregnant to take abortion pills without seeing a medic became permanent last year.
‘Weaponise’
Following the court’s ruling, Clare Murphy, the CEO of BPAS which supplied the pills to Foster, claimed there “has never been a clearer mandate for parliamentary action and the need has never been so urgent”.
Speaking to Sky News, Labour MP Stella Creasy called for the law to give women a “legal human right to a safe abortion at the time of her choosing”.
The Christian Institute’s Ciarán Kelly said: “The loss of life is always a tragic event, and we grieve for the death of baby Lily. It is appalling that activists who lobbied to end in-person consultations are now weaponising this situation to push for abortion on demand.
“They have persistently ignored warnings that home abortions exacerbate all the risks. Haemorrhaging, cramps and excruciating pain without medical help close at hand is hardly good care for women. We should be seeking to care for women and the unborn, not cause them harm”.
- The time limit for abortion is 12 weeks in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, and Greece. It’s 14 weeks in France and Spain.
- ‘Viability’, i.e. when babies are expected to survive outside the womb, was originally set at at 28 weeks. In 1990, due to medical advances it was lowered to 24 weeks. But there’s still no limit where a child is deemed to have a disability.
- In 2019, two in five babies born at 23 weeks and receiving treatment in UK neonatal units were expected to survive.
- A baby born at the age of the child in this case would almost certainly survive. Many mothers have told of how their children, born at 33 weeks or younger, are now healthy adults.
‘A growing human’
Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who supports the current abortion law, backed the court ruling and attacked those arguing for abortion up to birth.
She wrote: “Choosing to kill a baby that is perfectly viable outside the womb is not ‘healthcare’, whatever any of the pro-choice-at-any-stage brigade like to claim”.
Sarah Vine also opposed the calls for ‘abortion on demand’ from BPAS and MPs Stella Creasy and Diane Johnson in a piece for The Daily Mail.
Vine, who backs a European-style 12-week limit, wrote: “A foetus is not just a bit of extra tissue; it is a growing human”.
Side effects
Last year, a baby boy died after a mother took an abortion pill when she was 30 weeks pregnant. According to reports, the mother from East Yorkshire believed she was twelve weeks pregnant when she decided to have an abortion.
The coroner said baby Ronnie would have probably survived if the real length of the pregnancy had been correctly identified and he had been born in an appropriate setting.
Freedom of Information requests showed that ambulance call-outs in April-December 2020 involving abortion pills were 54% higher than the equivalent period in 2019. At least 10,000 women reportedly attended hospital in 2020 with serious side effects following a home abortion.
Mythbuster: DIY abortion pills are neither simple nor safe