OAN Staff Abril Elfi 
1:07 PM – Wednesday, June 18, 2025

The Parliament of the United Kingdom has initiated preliminary efforts to advance the decriminalization of late-term abortions.

The House of Commons approved an amendment to a broader crime bill to prevent women from being prosecuted for having abortions after the legal limit, potentially through birth, during a 379-137 vote on Tuesday. 

According to a report by the Associated Press, Labour Member of Parliament Tonia Antoniazzi introduced the amendment, arguing that the change was necessary on behalf of the more than 100 women investigated over the last five years for suspected illegal abortions.

“This piece of legislation will only take women out of the criminal justice system because they are vulnerable and they need our help.” Antoniazzi claimed, “Just what public interest is this serving? This is not justice, it is cruelty and it has got to end.”

Changes to the law enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic now allow women in the UK to receive abortion pills via mail for use “within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.”

However, numerous women have been punished for illegally acquiring abortion drugs in order to terminate pregnancies lasting 24 weeks or more.

In 2023, a mother of three was sentenced to two years in prison for medically causing an abortion while she was eight months pregnant. A month later, an appeals court lowered her sentence and ordered her release. The judge stated that the case required “compassion, not punishment,” and that jailing her would serve no meaningful purpose. 

Many opposed the vote, with Alithea Williams of the UK Society for the Protection of Unborn Children condemning the amendment. 

“We are horrified that MPs have voted for this extreme and barbaric proposal. If this clause becomes law, a woman who aborts her baby at any point in pregnancy, even moments before birth, would not be committing a criminal offence,” Williams said. “In fact, by dismissing the Infant Life Preservation Act intended to provide legal protection to a child during birth, a woman who killed her baby during delivery would not be committing an offence.”

“And this has been pushed by an abortion lobby cynically exploiting a situation that they brought about,” she added. “The cases they use of women being prosecuted for abortion – a number in the single digits – came about because of a policy they championed – sending women abortion pills in the post without in person appointments.”

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