‘But it Couldn’t Possibly Happen Here!’: A Rebuttal Against Comfortable Thinking After Roe v Wade

By Laura Griffin

On July 24th, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned a fifty-year-old precedent that protected an individual’s right to choose an abortion. It was a blow to reproductive rights that sent shockwaves around the world.

You may be forgiven for thinking that we in the UK are safe in a country where the vast majority of citizens are pro-choice and abortion is an open option for whoever requires it. But looking closer at the legal provisions of abortion in the UK, such comfortable thinking may actually be false.

A pregnant person in the UK can access a free and safe abortion for the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy and can have an abortion beyond this point for medical reasons that threaten the life of the pregnant person. So far, so good. However, two doctors must sign off on any abortion before it can go ahead – in any instance. This is quite a strange requirement; no other medical procedure needs this type of sign-off.

This sign-off also determines if, in continuing the pregnancy, there is either a risk to the person’s life, a risk of permanent physical or mental injury to them, or a risk of injury to existing children of the pregnant individual.

Whilst this covers a lot of individual cases and is a step in the right direction for reproductive rights, it still falls startlingly short of what a lot of people in the UK may believe the law is. Abortion is not legally an on-demand service, where all an individual needs to go through with this procedure is the desire to do so.

If a pregnant person goes through with an abortion without the approval of two doctors, legally speaking, a crime has been committed. Not only that, but the individual would be charged under a law established in 1861, which states that it is illegal for a pregnant person to ‘procure a miscarriage’. The law of the land is unemotionally clear. Bodily autonomy is available to people who can become pregnant in the UK – subject to certain terms and conditions.

Certain people who have never had to make this kind of difficult decision in their lives claim that we all need to calm down. Don’t we know that America is not Britain? The overturning of Roe v Wade, they believe, is irrelevant to our day-to-day British life and has been blown out of proportion by social media and ‘woke’ politicians.

A piece for The Spectator even went so far as to say that the current Conservative government (at least at the time of writing) had made abortion easier to access over the last twelve years, with medical abortions being allowed at home since the March 2020 lockdown, and legalisation being put in place to make abortion easier to access in Northern Ireland.

It has always frustrated me when people who have no real skin in the game tell those of us who do that we’re overreacting when our rights are, once again, put up for debate. How nice it must be to not worry about your humanity being degraded due to a change of government or a change in legislative tone. Maybe one day we’ll be so lucky.

To view Britain as an ideological island impervious to the buffeting waves of extreme right-wing politics from across the pond is naïve at best. There were rejoicings from a small but determined minority who believe that abortion is a stain on modern British society, which came in thick and fast after Roe was rescinded.

Jubilant statements came from Bishop John Keenan of Paisley, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and Lord David Alton, who tweeted: ‘This decision demonstrates that abortion laws are not written in stone and that the insistence of the abortion industry that this is a “settled matter” is delusional.’

Buffer zones are once again being looked at for abortion clinics too. Anti-choice protestors are clearly being seen as a threat to those wishing to seek medical interventions in their pregnancies, which is not so dissimilar from similar occurrences across the pond.

The current government is not the defender of reproductive rights that some believe it to be. Whilst medical abortions at home were brought in during March 2020, the government also recently moved to end this accessible and effective programme, despite the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and RCOG raising their objections.

The service only exists today due to a House of Commons vote, which saved the programme from the government’s axe – for the time being. This raises uneasy questions over why the government would end a medical service that was working and was backed by medical professionals.

The government’s record on Northern Ireland is not much better. Advice, support, and access to abortions continue to be difficult, and the Health Minister of Northern Ireland, an openly anti-choice Robin Swann, continues to not publish any information about available abortion services and support on the Department for Health website. This is all despite abortion being decriminalised in October 2019. Clearly, the procedure is in limbo; it is legal but not accessible.

Dominic Raab, when asked to include provisions for abortion access in an upcoming bill of rights, stated that abortion does not need to be covered in the legislation, as it has been ‘settled in UK law in relation to abortion, [and] it’s decided by members across this house.’ I think Lord Alton and many other anti-choice proponents would disagree with you on that one, Mr Raab.

With all the cracks in abortion legislation and access to the procedure not always straightforward, it seems clear that this current government don’t see codifying reproductive rights into law as important. After all, when you have potential future PM Liz Truss spouting transphobic statements and reducing women to merely ‘people with cervixes’, it’s pretty obvious how little importance the current government places on any person who has a uterus and requires medical assistance or an identity beyond their reproductive organs.

But the personhoods of cis women, non-binary people, trans men, and anyone who can become pregnant are important and not up for debate. Resting on our laurels and saying that ‘it couldn’t possibly happen here’ is how complacency negates legitimate concerns as overreacting – and can lead to human beings losing the few rights they had.

Not only should we be fighting for abortion laws to be updated and protected, but we also should be fighting for abortion to be more accessible to any person who requires it for any reason and from any background.

Until anyone can request and receive an abortion for any reason, we cannot pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. As it is, it is a job half done – a job easily undone.