Towards Decriminalization? New Battlegrounds in Abortion Politics

This chapter focuses on the newest battlegrounds in the UK abortion debate. This includes growing calls for decriminalisation, involving the repeal of sections of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, and the increasing purchase these are finding inside Parliament and among the medical profession. It also includes new debates about sex-selective abortion and abortion in the cases of severe disability, and the need for the pro-choice movement to organise horizontally to address the needs of all women. It ends with an assessment of the future prospects of both the movement for decriminalisation, and the movement for more restrictive abortion law.

Feminism Enters the Debate

This chapter considers the entry of feminist arguments about abortion into UK parliamentary debates in the 1970s. A contingent of MPs willing to advocate for legal abortion on feminist grounds had developed. However, the wording of the Abortion Act placed feminist actors in a difficult position; the gendered implications of the Act were troubling, but at the same time it was essential to defend it from attack by opponents of legal abortion. This resulted in some tricky compromises, in which feminist actors would defend a ‘right to choose’ without examining the failure of the Act to provide exactly that. Yet difficulties were present for anti-abortion actors, who risked being perceived as being ‘against’ helping vulnerable women. Anti-abortion speeches during this period were ambiguous and confused in how they discussed women.

Introduction

This chapter gives a brief overview of the current terrain of abortion debate in the UK, covering calls for decriminalisation as well as debates on sex-selection, disability and pre-abortion counselling. It argues that the classic image of abortion politics as a war between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ actors cannot adequately accommodate these recent developments – nor does it fit with how abortion debates have actually unfolded in Britain historically. Instead, it offers an interpretation of abortion law as resting on a coalition between government and medical actors formed to govern women’s reproductive decisions. The chapter closes with an overview of the book.

Backlash and Appropriation

This chapter assesses abortion debates in the 1980s and 1990s. By this point, anti-abortion actors were attempting to solve their PR problem by mimicking their opponents’ arguments, moving away from a conservative emphasis on morality and vice, and towards an appropriation of the liberal-paternalist and feminist arguments that had been put forward in support of legal abortion. This was done by adopting seemingly feminist language in talking about medical power, exploitation and women’s rights. Pro-choice and feminist actors, on the other hand, typically avoided challenging the logics underpinning the Abortion Act. Few alternatives to the current, highly medicalised system of abortion provision were proffered; rather, pro-choice actors were forced into a reactive position defending the Abortion Act from anti-abortion attacks.

Conclusion

This chapter places abortion debates in Britain in the context of both anti-abortion strategy worldwide and the global struggle for reproductive justice, touching on issues of race, ethnicity, migration and nation. There has recently been a twofold shift in the terrain of British pro-choice argument. One the one hand, the British pro-choice coalition has shifted from a politics of protection – which emphasises women’s vulnerability and thereby supports a paternalistic, medicalised regime of abortion regulation – to a politics of liberation, which emphasises women’s authority over their own reproductive decisions. On the other hand, there is a growing need to acknowledge intersectional or reproductive justice claims in abortion politics. The chapter closes by asking whether the pro-choice movement is being pulled in two different directions, and how it can steer between them.

Into the 21st Century

This chapter explores UK abortion debates in the 21st century. It describes new anti-abortion strategies which emerged in the 2000s and went beyond the familiar attacks on abortion providers. It demonstrates how issues such as foetal viability and calls for changes in pre-abortion counselling provision evolved as a consequence both of past anti-abortion activity and how pro-choice feminist actors have made their arguments. The chapter argues that counselling amendments are proposed because they undermine the association between a ‘right to choose’ and feminist politics and call into question the medical authority on which the Abortion Act 1967 was based.

Passing the Abortion Act 1967

This chapter looks at the debates surrounding the passage of the Abortion Act 1967 and how it operated to extend medical power over abortion. It argues that in order for medicalisation to take place, it was necessary to convince doctors that they had a legitimate ‘social’ as well as ‘medical’ role. This was achieved in particular through a series of revisions to the controversial ‘social clause’ of the Act, which provided for abortions for non-medical reasons. Constructions of women seeking abortion as victims or essentially vulnerable – and therefore in need of the authority and paternalistic guidance of the doctor – were central to this process.

Regulating the Female Body

This chapter sets the history of abortion law this in the context of feminist critique, exploring the significance of access to abortion for women’s lives and the gendered structure of society. It contains a discussion of feminist writing on pregnancy and motherhood and what these mean for female subjectivity: from Simone de Beauvoir’s description of pregnancy as a ‘servitude’, to Shulamith Firestone’s call for reproductive technologies that can separate the process of reproduction from women’s bodies. This chapter also explores the reproductive justice movement, which has emphasised the ways in which the needs of poor, minority ethnic and migrant women may differ from those of white middle-class women. The chapter argues that access to abortion can have radical implications for women’s lives, freeing women from compulsory motherhood. Yet celebratory accounts of abortion in Britain must be tempered. Abortion law has always relied heavily on the capacity of the medical profession to control women’s reproductive choices.