The U.K.’s Abortion Reckoning

The U.K. has pushed too far on abortion. On June 17, an amendment to decriminalize abortion for women in England and Wales was thrown last minute into a government bill. Under the proposed change, women would no longer be prosecuted or imprisoned for ending pregnancies beyond the legal twenty-four-week limit, though doctors and accomplices would still be penalized. Labour MPs backed the amendment, reasoning that they would not be legalizing abortion up to birth—a profoundly unpopular position—but merely protecting women who would only ever perform late-term abortions out of sheer desperation. After just two hours of debate, the amendment sailed through by 379 votes to 137. It now progresses to the House of Lords.

With an assisted suicide bill passing the House of Commons just three days later, it was one of the darkest weeks in our country’s history. But as a pro-lifer, I am more hopeful about the future than I have ever been. For the first time in my life, I believe we can start to win back ground. Hitting rock-bottom has made it easier to look up.

The progressive left has pushed the British public to the breaking point on abortion. In 2010, Sarah Catt aborted her baby at thirty-nine weeks. The child posed no risk to her health, nor was she under duress or a victim of abuse or trafficking. Her only apparent motivation was to hide a seven-year affair from her husband. Catt was given an eight-year prison sentence. The case was publicized in full, and Catt was shown to be not a vulnerable victim of systemic oppression with no choice, but an adulterous killer who slaughtered her baby at full-term without remorse.

The reaction to the recent amendment suggests the overwhelming majority of the British public agree with this assessment. A Telegraph poll found that 91 percent of readers opposed the amendment. Lifelong pro-choice feminists chastised Parliament for re-opening a settled debate. Doctors defending the new law were dragged over the coals on television by fellow pro-choice interviewers. The deputy leader of Reform U.K., currently leading the polls, called the government “baby killers.” Reform is now rumored to be putting a repeal of the law in its manifesto. The cult of individualism has finally bitten off more than it can chew.

This is unprecedented. For as long as I can remember, U.K. law, institutions, and public opinion on abortion have gone consistently in one direction. The abortion industry’s narrative virtually always wins the PR battle, no matter how untrue. Yet this time, the lights have been switched on.

Brits and Europeans more broadly take pride in avoiding the raging culture war over abortion that dominates the U.S., adopting centrist positions that would be considered conservative by most American pro-abortion advocates. While abortion was effectively legalized on demand up to birth in many U.S. states, a position supported by 20 to 30 percent of the population, almost every country in Europe prohibits abortion on demand after around twelve weeks. Opinion polls show fewer than 1 percent of women in the U.K. support abortion on demand after viability.

Traditionally this has worked in favor of abortion access by making abortion a settled issue in most of Europe. Ninety percent of abortions are permitted, debate is minimal, and the overwhelming majority claim to support abortion access in general.

But the progressive clergy have become dissatisfied with their stable dominance in recent years, spurred in part by the prospect of Roe v. Wade’s collapse and the unwarranted fear that abortion was similarly imperiled in the Old World. In 2019, Iceland increased its abortion limit to twenty-two weeks. In 2022, Finland removed the requirement to give a reason for an abortion within the first twelve weeks. In 2024, France gave abortion constitutional protection, and Denmark recently increased their abortion limit from twelve to eighteen weeks.

The U.K. took the momentum further than most. But as dreadful as the development is, it came at the best possible time. Less than a year after it was elected with an enormous majority, the Labour government has fallen to around 20 percent vote share in the polls and lost the public’s trust. The assisted suicide bill combined with the abortion amendment portray Labour not as a serious, problem-solving alternative to the failed Conservative government but as, in the words of one leading pro-choice feminist, a “death cult.”

Meanwhile, after years of drifting ever leftward, the Conservatives are battling with Reform U.K. for the title of “true conservatives.” (Reform took around half of the Conservative votes last election.) Even socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing, pro-Palestine voting bloc almost all voted against the amendment, representing their largely Muslim voter base. There are tectonic shifts in the U.K. on both ends of the political spectrum—and the horseshoe is, somewhat surprisingly, pointing toward a future for pro-life politics. 

This raises challenging questions for the U.S. pro-life movement, where it is widely accepted that women should never be prosecuted for abortions because they are always vulnerable victims. There are, of course, good strategic reasons for this posture, and good principled reasons to refrain from prosecution in many cases—but the American pro-life mainstream should perhaps find it odd that their position puts them to the left of the majority of British pro-choicers, who are shocked at the inhumanity of such decriminalization.

That shock is what gives hope to the pro-life movement in the U.K. Instead of further entrenching abortion into the legal and cultural fabric of the U.K., this amendment has resurrected a debate that died decades ago. As ordinary pro-choicers revisit the question of when the abortion limit should be, there is a new opportunity to encourage them to follow the science as they do so—science that points inescapably to the moment of conception.