On Tuesday 28 November 2023, Labour MPs Dame Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy tabled amendments NC1 and NC2 respectively to the Government’s Criminal Justice Bill. Both amendments would decriminalise abortion.

On 25 January 2024, these amendments were debated at Committee stage and withdrawn. Now, Diana Johnson has tabled a very similar amendment, in the hope that it will be debated by MPs at Report stage. The earliest this can happen is 4th March.

What does the amendment do?

The text of Diana Johnson’s amendment, New Clause 1, is:

To move the following Clause—

“Removal of women from the criminal law related to abortion.

For the purposes of sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.”

This would mean a woman could carry out her own abortion at any time, for any reason. While the explanatory note claims that the amendment “would not change any law regarding the provision of abortion services within a healthcare setting, including but not limited to the time limit”, more than half of abortions are now carried out by a woman in her own home, under the pills by post policy. A woman who took abortion pills at home at any stage of pregnancy, even just before natural birth, and so ended the life of a full term baby, would not commit any offence.

From the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child SPUC

If this amendment is accepted a baby in the womb is not protected by law in the UK if the Criminal Justice Bill is passed at any stage. So a women can end the life her child immediately before birth but a few days later when the child is born if she takes the life of her child it would be infanticide, she would have killed her child unlawfully. Surely this is nonsense by any reckoning. Pro-abortionists are bent on hi jacking legislation to push forward their ideology that the woman has the right to do as she wishes with her own body. But common sense and medicine cannot reconcile this. The baby has only half the mother’s genes. Twenty three chromosomes from the father and 23 from the mother make up the embryo. The father gets no say and genes are passed down through the generations. The baby is a separate human being albeit nourished in the womb by the mother.

Moreover, the proabortion ideology speaks of the mother’s right to choose and ignores the most basic human right which is the right to life. The baby is human from conception and has this right. Medical science tells us this. Yet the facts are ignored in the face of ideology. This is another reminder of how ideology distorts reality and is de humanising.

I pray that this amendment is rejected. Many lives of innocent human beings could be saved and many mothers saved from years of regret.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, the third Sunday of Lent, we hear about how Jesus drove the money changers out of the Temple with the words, “Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market.” When challenged by the Jews and asked for a sign to justify this, Jesus says “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.” “But Jesus was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body, and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this…”

(John 2: 13 – 25)

Pause for thought

“I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.” Matthew 25: 40