UK – The Guardian view on abortion prosecutions: decriminalisation can’t wait

The trial of Nicola Packer shows why MPs should seize the opportunity to change the law and safeguard vulnerable women now

Editorial
Wed 14 May 2025

The Crown Prosecution Service has yet to explain why it thought that pursuing a case against Nicola Packer was in the public interest. Thankfully, jurors last week cleared the 45-year-old of illegally terminating her pregnancy. But more than four years of police and criminal proceedings have had a lasting impact on a woman already traumatised by discovering that she was 26 weeks pregnant, not about 10, when she acted. The trial dragged her private life – even her sexual preferences – into the public eye. Understandably, she called it “humiliating”. But it is prosecutors who should feel shame.

Ms Packer was prescribed abortion pills in a remote consultation, due to a Covid lockdown. Prosecutors alleged that she deliberately breached the abortion time limit. Jurors believed Ms Packer, who said that she was horrified to realise how advanced her pregnancy was when she saw the foetus and that she “wouldn’t have put the baby or myself through it” had she known.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/14/the-guardian-view-on-abortion-prosecutions-decriminalisation-cant-wait

14.05.2025

Editorial

1967 Abortion Act

British Medical Association

Crown Prosecution Service

decriminalisation of abortion

Laws and ethics must work together to achieve gender equality

Editorial, By Surjit Singh Flora, statetimes_editor
Mar 23, 2025

Female feticide and sex-selective abortion are major issues globally, worsened by medical advancements like ultrasonography and amniocentesis that allow parents to know the fetus’s sex early in pregnancy.

… A 2022 report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) highlighted India, China, Azerbaijan, and Vietnam as the countries with the most unfavourable sex ratios. In patriarchal societies, the preference for male children, combined with smaller family sizes and sex-determination technologies, has led to a notable demographic imbalance. This imbalance has worsened issues like the increasing trafficking of women, forced marriages, and overall social instability.

Continued: https://statetimes.in/laws-and-ethics-must-work-together-to-achieve-gender-equality/

23.03.2025

Editorial

PCPNDT Act

sex ratio imbalance

sex selection abortion

sex-selective abortion

Surjit Singh Flora

UNFPA

United Nations Population Fund

Time is running out: let’s accelerate progress towards gender equity in health care

8 March 2025

Frances Longley, FIGO Chief Executive

This international Women's Day we must reflect on the of the serious challenges women and girls face.

Every 11 minutes, a woman or girl is killed by a member of her own family. One in three women have suffered physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both.

Worldwide, 800 women die every day worldwide from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth and 40% live in countries where abortion laws are restrictive. 270 million women worldwide have no access to modern contraception.

Continued: https://www.figo.org/blog/time-running-out-lets-accelerate-progress-towards-gender-equity-health-care

08.03.2025

Editorial

Accelerate Action theme

female genital mutilation

FIGO

Frances Longley

International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics

International Women’s Day

intimate partner violence

Change Nigeria’s obsolete abortion law

24th November 2024
By Punch Editorial Board

WOMEN’S reproductive rights remain a polarising subject in Nigeria. They are rooted in historical and moral complexities. Yet, as society evolves and medical science advances, the omnipresence of draconian laws governing abortion has become an existential threat to Nigerian women, particularly the vulnerable.

Maternal mortality, unplanned pregnancies, rape, and incest are grim realities that demand a shift in perspective and policy. There is a need for progressive reforms in abortion laws, not to advocate reckless terminations but to align with a woman’s right to life, health, and dignity within the bounds of morality and medical science.

Continued: https://punchng.com/change-nigerias-obsolete-abortion-law/

24.11.2024

severe foetal abnormalities

Society of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians of Nigeria

Indonesia – Safe abortion saves lives

In practice, women have long been struggling to access safe abortions, even when they have the right to terminate the pregnancy.

Editorial board (The Jakarta Post)
Sat, August 10, 2024

The government just enacted a new rule that makes it easier for women to get safe abortions in cases of rape or medical emergency. This is part of a larger health reform that was introduced last year to improve women's reproductive health and reduce maternal deaths.

The regulation requires certain large clinics and hospitals to provide medical assistance before and after abortion for rape survivors with a gestational age up to 14 weeks, and women with life-threatening medical conditions or if the fetus has lethal anomalies. The regulation has been welcomed by women's and human rights groups, but they have also criticized a requirement for rape survivors to obtain a statement from the police attesting that their pregnancy resulted from rape or sexual violence.

Continued: https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2024/08/10/safe-abortion-saves-lives.html

10.08.2024

Abortion-ban exceptions won’t provide much relief for Iowa women. Here’s why.

The bigger picture won’t change unless a reconstituted Iowa Legislature repeals this law, which offends human rights and, as measured by polls, the wishes of Iowans.

The Register's editorial, Des Moines Register
July 28, 2024

Six years of trying will pay off Monday for Gov. Kim Reynolds and Iowa Republicans: A law that bans almost all abortions will take effect.

And “almost all” means “almost all.” Tying the abortion prohibition to the detection of cardiac activity means many girls and women won’t realize they are pregnant before it’s too late to seek care.

Continued: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/2024/07/28/iowa-abortion-ban-exceptions-provide-little-relief-rape-incest-emergency/74534809007/

29.07.2024

Iowans for Health Liberty

UK – Abolish this archaic law that makes criminals of innocent women

MPs have the chance to end the traumatic prosecutions of women suspected of ending their pregnancies

Observer editorial
Sun 12 May 2024

According to one leading provider of abortion services in the UK, police investigations into women suspected of unlawfully ending their own pregnancy have increased substantially in recent years.

Earlier this year, MSI Reproductive Choices reported that this type of criminal investigation was very rare before 2018, but that it was aware of many more happening since then. While the number of women prosecuted for this offence remains small – four in the past 20 years – these police investigations can be traumatic for women, some of whom may have lost their babies, and the risk of prosecution can hang over them for months.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/12/the-observer-view-on-abortion-abolish-this-archaic-law-that-makes-criminals-of-innocent-women

12.05.2024

Editorial

Abortion Act 1967

decriminalisation of abortion

investigating women for abortion

MSI Reproductive Choices

Offences Against the Person Act 1861

prosecuting women for abortion

telemedicine abortion

The New Threat to Abortion Access in the United States—The Comstock Act

I. Glenn Cohen, JD; Eli Y. Adashi, MD, MS; Mary Ziegler, JD
JAMA. Published online July 13, 2023. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.9360

In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, there have been many legislative attempts to restrict abortion, as well as lawsuits seeking to buttress those initiatives or further restrict abortion. Such litigation has centered, among other things, on whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act overrides potentially conflicting state laws that seek to limit abortion exceptions for the health and life of the mother, whether the US Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone was unlawful, and whether abortion bans violate various state constitutions.

In this Viewpoint we discuss an issue that that has received less attention and is being litigated in several courts—the Comstock Act. … We explain the history of this old law, its use by those seeking to restrict abortion, and why it threatens abortion access in the US.

Continued: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2807457

13.07.2023

Editorial

Comstock Act

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Jonathan F. Mitchell

mailing abortion pills

UK – The Guardian view on abortion law: the case for decriminalisation

The outrage caused by the jailing of a mother for ending her pregnancy after the legal limit should spark a wider rethink of archaic legislation

Editorial
Tue 13 Jun 2023

The case of a mother prosecuted for inducing her own abortion after the legal limit is tragic. Her imprisonment is unconscionable. The judge accepted that she was in “emotional turmoil” when she ended her pregnancy at between 32 and 34 weeks: with lockdown imposed, she had moved back in with her estranged partner while carrying another man’s child and was seeking to hide the pregnancy. She has since experienced guilt and depression, and is plagued by nightmares and “flashbacks to seeing [her] dead child’s face”. Her three children, one of whom has special needs and is thus especially reliant upon her, will be denied her for the next 14 months.
decri
Many have asked good questions about the decisions of prosecutors to pursue the case in these circumstances, and of the judge to impose a prison sentence. Nonetheless, as the judge identified, ultimately the issue is the law itself.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/13/the-guardian-view-on-abortion-law-the-case-for-decriminalisation

13.06.2023

Editorial

British Medical Association

British Pregnancy Advisory Service

decriminalisation of abortion

jailing women for abortion

How the US scrapping of Roe v Wade threatens the global medical abortion revolution

Medical abortions are a global success story, and not one that will be easily derailed by the legislative backsliding in the US. Time, now, to close the access gaps, report Sally Howard and Geetanjali Krishna

BMJ 2022; 379
doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o2349 (Published 19 October 2022)

Sally Howard, Geetanjali Krishna

In 2021, a 20 year old woman in Hyderabad, India, discovered she was pregnant.
A well educated, city girl, she was nevertheless afraid of the stigma attached
to unmarried pregnancy and did not know if she could legally terminate the
pregnancy. Around the same time, another young couple living together in
Bengaluru were in a similar predicament.

“Both women were not ready for a child but completely clueless about the
options they had, and the gestation period up to which abortion is legally
allowed in India,” says Anusha Pilli, a doctor who practises privately in
Hyderabad. Pilli helped both women to get medical abortions before their first
trimesters ended.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2349