In the memorable first transformation scene depicted in Robert Louis Stephenson’s <em>The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</em>, Doctor Jekyll recalls, “within, I was conscious of a heady recklessness…a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul…I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature…”
A similar transformation took place on Tuesday this week in the House of Commons. An overwhelming majority of our members of parliament voted to decriminalise abortion up to birth, at least for abortion self-inflicted by the mother, with no in-person medical presence.
As seems typical of political decisions which we are assured by their supporters are vital, crucial and of profound importance, the proposed legislation was not advertised in any manifesto or given time for serious debate, let alone scrutiny.
The vote was for an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill: a Bill elsewhere seeking to reduce, not enable, violence (for example, knife crime). Due to reckless government decisions in 2020 and 2022 to allow women to take abortion pills with only a remote consultation, the police were faced with reports of women aborting at home babies at much later stages of gestation than the law allowed, or than was medically recommended for home abortions.
Six women were prosecuted in the past three years and of these cases three were dropped. Due to the publicity, the law may have served to deter other people from this dangerous, highly traumatic act. Many of the MPs who took the decision for home abortion during Covid and then ensured the arrangement was preserved are those crying loudest about the suffering they themselves helped bring about.
Our now hyper-liberal and individualist society emphasises certain forms of suffering to the detriment of all other values. The suffering a woman will experience from being prosecuted for killing – however reluctantly – her late-term unborn child must, it seems, outweigh all other considerations. A highly selective focus on “suffering” generates a new standardised policy for all as a class of suffering victims is erected and a class of legal oppressors is demonised. This “hands off” approach of mechanised benevolence is framed as a compassionate measure.
Hyper-liberal politicians get to express their “compassion” for those who illegally take their baby’s life, for doubtless the woman is indeed suffering and this is compounded by the suffering caused by alllaws prohibiting the taking of human life – an always “difficult” decision which here we trust the person to make and which will infallibly be made “for the very best of reasons”. Quite why such considerations don’t extend to infanticide outside the womb – also something perpetrated often by desperate parents – must remain a mystery.
On this crude picture, played out against an even cruder background of victims and oppressors, suffering is only ever to be eliminated and its very existence is meant to shut down any further questions as to what justice is, and mercy; what the human person is; and what motherhood and pregnancy might mean and demand of us all.
Women having late illegal abortions are indeed vulnerable: let us look at some actual cases. “<a href="https://gript.ie/tragic-stories-of-abuse-should-not-lead-the-uk-to-decriminalise-abortion/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Laura</mark></a>” was a young woman convicted of abortion at 30 weeks whose violent boyfriend had bought pills for her online. She said that, when she delivered her dead infant, “I wanted to die. Honestly, I just felt like the whole world had just ended in front of my eyes.” Reflecting on her court case, she said "I don't think I could have been any more remorseful."
Laura served a two-year sentence, having failed to disclose the abuse (her boyfriend had threatened to kill her if she did so). Had she revealed it, mercy would probably have been shown her in sentencing – but reading about her story may still have deterred another Laura from yielding to her boyfriend’s imposition, leading hopefully to a safe delivery, a live baby and a safe living environment for the woman.
In another case, Carla Foster took abortion pills which killed her 32-34 week old unborn child and was sentenced to 28 months, a sentence reduced and suspended on appeal. The judge who gave the original sentence<mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/12/woman-in-uk-jailed-for-28-months-over-taking-abortion-pills-after-legal-time-limit">commented</a></mark>: “I accept that you feel very deep and genuine remorse for your actions. You are racked by guilt and have suffered depression. I also accept that you had a very deep emotional attachment to your unborn child and that you are plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to seeing your dead child’s face.”
This all-too-real suffering of a woman who self-aborted and experienced the birth of a dead baby were, apparently, not the concern of those who supported the very legislation that paved the way to such cases. Only the fact that the law became involved now outrages the guilty lawmakers. Instead of repenting of their actions, our lawmakers redouble their efforts in the name of a compassion lacking not only justice but any real grasp of the causes of women’s suffering.
In the face of these horrors, Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, has complained about Parliament's failure to put her own – far more destructive – amendment to the vote: an amendment that would have decriminalised abortion up to birth not just for the woman, but for “all those involved in ensuring that women can access safe and legal abortions”. Ms Creasy referred disapprovingly to the pro-life movement "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/18/abortion-criminal-offence-uk-parliament-progressives"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">using women’s bodies as the battlefield for the culture wars" </mark></a>- though it is abortion that makes women's bodies a literal “battlefield”: a place of violence, not one of nurture.
Creasy’s own amendment was part of an ongoing effort to place the mantle of medicine and not just that of “choice” over the practice of abortion. This long-term anti-Hippocratic project is an ingenious one. For by placing that mantle over acts of killing, the “stigma” of abortion is weakened – healthcare is, after all, a “public good” – affecting what people see as “thinkable”. Any stubborn stigma that remains is presented as almost as grave an evil as the person’s trauma at having taken a life. Yet the provision of home abortion pills has, of course, removed that very medical oversight which might have prevented the kind of real harms recounted above, by preventing self-abortion.
The real medical dangers of the abortion pill, compounded by telemedicine abortion, are by now <a href="https://eppc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/25-04-The-Abortion-Pill-Harms-Women.pdf"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">well-known</mark></a>. The removal of criminal sanctions acts as, in effect, a further stamp of societal approval of the killing of babies old enough for even vocal abortion advocates to shudder over their fate. That removal will, inevitably, increase the number of cases of late abortions, and the dead babies and their mothers will be even less visible as those who abandoned them move on to their next compassionate cause.
Years ago I used to debate against Ann Furedi, the former head of BPAS and wife of Frank Furedi, long associated with a group called the Revolutionary Communist Party which over the years transformed into what is now Spiked Online. The Furedis and their associates (which includes writers Brendan O’Neill and Mick Hume) would uniformly chant a mantra that abortion should be permissible for “any reason” and “up to birth” (occasionally there would be a slip up and Ellie Lee, one of the members, would also justify post-birth infanticide on public radio). Lee was busy calling for abortion decriminalisation at Spiked Online this week while Ann Furedi has always told us that unless you support her radical position you cannot be called “pro-choice”.
As members of this cult busily re-invent themselves as “cultural conservatives” and “nationalist” voices, now defending other forms of post-birth killing of innocents in the name of “defence”, it is worth remembering that the evil they so vigorously promoted has now entered the political mainstream. Once you trifle with an evil like abortion, don’t be surprised that the kind of guilt it induces takes the form of a self-righteous rage which will do everything to remove even the slightest whiff of stigma which attends to the shedding of innocent blood.
Which takes us back to Stephenson’s extraordinary tale. A good society cannot simply trifle with evil and expect to maintain its substance. Evil, though metaphysically parasitic on good, has in the practical realm an ineluctable force which will overwhelm good if no effort has been made to root out the evil which was initially restrained. Jekyll recalls of Hyde’s murder of Sir Danvers Carew, “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim.”
Perhaps now is a good time, with evil in plain sight, to remind our society of those who trifled with that symbol of peace, the mother with child – a symbol whose representation makes up the Mandarin Chinese character for “good”.
<strong><em>Anthony McCarthy is Director of the Bios Centre <a href="http://www.bioscentre.org">www.bioscentre.org</a></em></strong>
<em>(Photo by Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images)</em>
