Women’s abortion rights are under attack in many countries across Europe and in the USA, but the pro-choice movement in the UK has recently made gains for women’s rights. For instance an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill (2025), carried in Parliament on 17 June 2025, decriminalised actions by women to terminate their own pregnancies.
Whilst trans men, intersex and non-binary people are also affected by regressive laws on reproductive rights, this article mostly refers to ‘women’ as this is the category dealt with by UK abortion legislation. This does not mean that the reproductive experiences of queer people are not included in the context of this article, but that these experiences require greater depth, nuance and exploration than can be effectively covered in this piece.
Abortion law in the UK
The framework of UK abortion law was largely set in the Nineteenth Century. This was at the time of the growth of the bureaucracy of the modern state, with increased documentation of the lives of citizens, including legal requirements for the registration of births and stillbirths. The Offences Against the Person Act (1861) contained two clauses which criminalised termination of pregnancy; Section 58 which prohibits a woman from taking any actions to bring about a miscarriage of her own pregnancy, for instances taking drugs, and Section 59 which prohibits anyone else from helping a woman to miscarry.
These sections of the 1861 Act – which predate women’s right to vote and the invention of the lightbulb – are still part of UK law today, and make abortion a criminal act, since they were never repealed by the Abortion Act (1967).
The Abortion Act (1967) provided for legal exceptions to the Offences Against the Person Act (1861). Abortion Rights, the leading pro-choice organisation in the UK, summarises the current law as follows:
Abortion is allowed up to 24 weeks on condition that continuing with the pregnancy involves a greater risk to:
- the physical or mental health of the woman, or
- the physical or mental health of the woman’s existing children than having a termination.
When establishing the level of risk to health, doctors can take into consideration a woman’s ‘actual or reasonably foreseeable environment’, which includes her personal and social situation. Abortion is also allowed if there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would ‘suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped’.
Abortion is allowed after 24 weeks if there is:
- risk to the life of the woman,
- evidence of severe foetal abnormality, or
- risk of grave physical and mental injury to the woman.
An abortion must be:
- agreed by two doctors (one in an emergency) and
- carried out by a doctor, and
- carried out in a government-approved hospital or clinic.
The Abortion Act (1967) was progressive for its time, and was passed thanks to the campaigning of the Abortion Reform Law Association – now part of Abortion Rights after a 2003 merger with the National Abortion Campaign – and due to a continued push to get it through parliament between 1952 and 1967. However, it did not decriminalise all abortions and it did not provide legal support for the principle of a woman’s choice, meaning that whilst a safe, legal route for abortion was introduced, women still lacked full control over what they chose to do with their bodies.
In 2025, it is worth considering what the legal implications would be for a non-binary or trans person who possessed a uterus and decides to have an abortion, in a framework that does not recognise them. Increasingly, there is a need to speak about reproductive justice for trans people, alongside women, which is also held back by this outdated abortion legislation.
Nonetheless the Abortion Act (1967) has provided basic access to legal abortion for many decades, helping countless women in desperate situations end their pregnancies safely and with less stigma than before. Because of this, the 1967 Act has been defended on many occasions by pro-choice activists when under attack.
This is the current law on abortion for England, Cymru (Wales), and Scotland. Abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland in 2020, with no conditions on abortions during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, something the UK is seriously behind on. Additionally, Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) do not apply in Scotland.
In the 1970s, several countries passed pro-choice legislation which permitted abortion on request in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. This legislation went beyond the level of provision in the Abortion Act (1967), which was based on protecting the doctor’s decision, reframing the question of abortion around a woman’s choice and privacy – as was the case with Roe vs Wade in the United States.
Many pro-choice doctors implemented the Abortion Act (1967), supporting the principle of a woman’s right to choose, meaning decades of experience of legal abortions has encouraged pro-choice attitudes among doctors.
Prosecutions of women
Since the law did not completely decriminalise abortion, it remained possible for women to be prosecuted for self-administering abortion pills. In recent years this has happened in a worrying number of cases, leading medical authorities like the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to call for a change in the law.
Women who have taken abortion pills without medical supervision, or had spontaneous miscarriages but were suspected of taking abortion pills, experienced distress and ongoing trauma due to unsympathetic police investigations. In the case of women experiencing miscarriage this was at a time when they should be receiving health support and compassion in the face of their loss.
In 2023 a woman, Carla Foster, was jailed for 28 months, later reduced on appeal to 14 months and suspended, for taking abortion pills. Organisations providing abortion services estimate that in the last five years the police have investigated around 100 women for self-induced abortion after decades of no prosecutions under the 1861 Act. Historically women had resorted to unsafe, DIY abortion methods or sought abortions from backstreet abortionists, which came with high mortality and morbidity rates.
The introduction of abortion pills has allowed women to terminate a pregnancy in a safer, and more private, manner. In the context of the increase in prosecutions of women around abortion, it would be naive to ignore how this new autonomy for women would be a threat to misogynistic, patriarchal power.
These prosecutions violate any rights to bodily autonomy and are instances of oppressive state policing of women’s bodies. The risk of prosecution can also prevent women from seeking medical help that they need by dehumanising the desperate position these women find themselves in. Additionally, the criminalisation of women over what they choose to do with their bodies entrenches further the idea of women as second-class citizens.
Education and awareness
The press coverage of cases of women prosecuted under the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) raised public awareness that abortion is still criminal in UK law, despite the exemptions provided by the Abortion Act (1967). Support for decriminalisation is growing, together with the understanding of the damage being done to women by being at risk of prosecution for taking abortion pills without medical sanction.
Many people who have grown up thinking abortion was simply legal in the UK, and available for women who wanted a termination, have become aware that the situation is complex and abortion rights are not as well established in law as they had assumed.
Recent change in UK abortion law
With pressure for legal reform growing, two MPs tabled amendments in 2025 to the Crime and Policing Bill. The successful amendment, tabled by Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour MP for Gower, removed women who terminate their own pregnancies from the criminal law in relation to abortion. This represents a partial decriminalisation of UK law in relation to abortion.
This vote was a win for the pro-choice movement and many women will immediately benefit. There was a parliamentary debate about extending abortion rights, rather than one of the many battles to protect the 1967 Act. MPs voted to increase women’s rights by protecting women from legal prosecution for taking actions to terminate their own pregnancies. Anti-abortionists will see this as a defeat for their attempts to restrict women’s reproductive freedom.
However, this vote is a partial, not a complete, decriminalisation of abortion and the pro-choice movement should campaign for full decriminalisation, and for the necessary state healthcare provision in relation to termination of pregnancy. We must be careful to not see this as ‘the end’ of this fight.
The case for decriminalisation
The argument for decriminalisation is essentially that there is no good reason termination of pregnancy should be subject to any more legal regulation than any other medical procedure. While there are cases for legal regulations in respect of patient care and entitlement to healthcare provision, having legislation which makes a medical procedure a criminal offence, except when approved by two doctors, puts abortion in a different category, as a matter of ‘morality’ and social control over women’s bodies, rather than a healthcare issue.
We must remember that decriminalisation is only one aspect of the fight for reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. We must continue to fight for well-funded healthcare, affordable housing, welfare benefits and high-quality childcare. We should demand justice in relation to the history of coercive sterilisations of hundreds of women of colour and disabled people, which still continue in some circumstances today.
As we fight for abortion, we must also resist the harmful idea that it is a solution for poverty, social deprivation, criminality or for those who are deemed unable to make decisions about their own bodies. We support abortion rights on the principles of women’s choice and bodily autonomy, not from a right-wing or conservative approach to social policy which divides citizens into desirables, who should be encouraged to reproduce, and undesirables, who should be discouraged from having children.
The way forward
The recent legal change gives pro-choice activists in Britain an opportunity to push forward for the full decriminalisation of abortion. It will be worth watching to see if any MPs bring a private member’s bill on the subject.
Another amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, bought about by Stella Casey MP, went further in its demands asking for the decriminalisation of abortion as well as a case for enshrining abortion rights as human rights. Unfortunately, this bill was side-lined in favour of the other but with a fire re-ignited around the protection and advancement of these rights, we could make this a reality with enough momentum behind it.
In the UK, the TUC and many trade unions have had strong pro-choice policies since the 1970s. These include support for a woman’s right to choose and decriminalisation of abortion. It is well understood that women’s equality in the workplace and in society cannot be achieved without reproductive rights.
Many young women in the UK have become mobilised recently around opposition to the misogyny of the Trump presidency, around trans rights and many other issues. Many doctors and health workers, including significant sections of the medical establishment support full decriminalisation of abortion.
Now is a good time to raise the demand for total decriminalisation of abortion law in the UK. This means repealing Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) and any legislation which depends upon it. It is vital that bodily autonomy is fought for to its fullest in a world where right-wing extremism has become ever more prevalent.
Some far-right groups campaign for ‘traditional family values’ and oppose equality for women in the workplace and the wider society. Their views are not, however, shared by the mass of working people, who have grown up in societies where women and men have greater equality, including formal equality within the law.
If future generations of women are to continue to benefit from the gains of feminism, then reproductive rights must be defended and extended.
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