UK Catholic Baroness Warns of ‘Terrifying’ Plan to Decriminalize Abortion Pills Up to Birth| National Catholic Register
Baroness Rosa Monckton says a proposed UK amendment would remove criminal penalties for women who end their own pregnancies at any stage, raising concerns about late-term, unsupervised abortions at home.
LONDON — A UK Catholic peer has warned that proposed legislation, currently passing through the British Parliament to decriminalize abortion up to birth, is a “terrifying proposition” and a “barbaric step” that would effectively encourage mothers to use abortion pills at home, even in later stages of pregnancy.
In an opinion piece in the Daily Mail published Wednesday, Baroness Rosa Monckton said Clause 191, an amendment to a Crime and Policing Bill, would remove “all remaining legal invigilation of women regarding abortion, allowing a mother-to-be to abort her baby, up to full term, for any reason at all, including its sex.”
The amendment, first tabled by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, was pushed through the House of Commons last June after just 46 minutes of backbench debate. If it passes through the House of Lords, it would no longer be a criminal offense for a woman to end her own pregnancy at any stage, including late in gestation, while leaving criminal penalties in place for others who perform unlawful abortions.
Baroness Monckton and Baroness Philippa Stroud are leading a coordinated bid to remove the clause from the bill and restore mandatory in‑person medical consultations before at‑home abortions.
In her article, Monckton said that if passed, the legislation “could increase the likelihood of women suffering coercive third-trimester terminations — since an abusive partner could point out there was no longer any legal penalty — and the unspeakable trauma of a late-term abortion without any medical supervision.”
Such a change in the law would effectively “re-introduce the backstreet abortion,” she argued, “as women beyond the current 24-week legal limit are in effect to be encouraged to abort at home, on their own, using pills ordered through the post, which are not designed for use outside of a clinical context beyond 10 weeks.”
Monckton also condemned how the amendment was pushed through the lower house “without any evidence, scrutiny or public consultation,” saying it is a “reckless and radical proposal with implications both for the mental and physical health of the mother, and disastrous consequences for the child.”
She pointed out what she called “a supreme irony”: Those who have persistently supported legalized abortion on the basis that it helps prevent backstreet terminations are now proposing that women be permitted to perform illegal terminations outside the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act “in an unsafe and unsupervised environment.”
The baroness, who has a daughter with Down syndrome and founded Team Domenica, a charity that helps people with learning disabilities, noted that unborn babies over 22 weeks are currently clinically euthanized in hospitals by lethal injection to avoid live birth.
Not only can this not be done in a home setting, she wrote, but abortion pills only remove the lining of the womb and induce labor. As a result, late-gestation babies aborted at home could be born alive.
“What happens then?” Monckton asked. “Would the mother have to kill her ‘aborted’ but living baby? How would she legally dispose of her baby’s body if she left it to die? Would she then face a murder charge?”
She also said she found it “extraordinary and chilling” that in a lobbying paper circulated by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists “there is not a single mention of the unborn child in the statement. It was as if no such person exists.”
Under the Clause 191 amendment, she stressed, it would also be illegal for any other person — including a medical practitioner — to be present if the pills are taken after the 24-week limit set out in the existing abortion law.
Baroness Monckton, who is the sister of the Catholic peer Lord Monckton of Brenchley, argued that disapplying the Infant Life Preservation Act, which has protected viable unborn babies since 1929, is a radical and “barbaric” step that effectively strips viable unborn children of personhood, likening their status to property in the slave‑owning American South. She also noted that there is almost no public support for extending abortion to birth.
Monckton further highlighted data showing significant complication rates for self‑managed abortions, invoked the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child’s call for protection “before as well as after birth,” and said she is determined to oppose Clause 191 so that she is not complicit in abandoning the last legal safeguards for these viable, unborn children.
