Covid hasn’t been good for any of us, but at least it’s been temporary. For unborn children, unfortunately, it has indirectly been a disaster.

At the beginning of lockdown, the government quietly eased an important part of the Abortion Act 1967. Citing the inaccessibility of licensed clinics to those confined at home, it temporarily removed the statutory requirement for an in-person appointment during a pregnancy’s first ten weeks. Instead it allowed the supply of both mifepristone and misoprostol by post for administration at home after a mere telephone consultation with any doctor, nurse or midwife.

This arrangement was always intended as a stopgap, and would have expired with the end of the emergency this August. Unfortunately temporary fixes have a bad habit of becoming fixed, especially when pressure groups, abortion providers and activists get in on the act. That is exactly what happened on Wednesday this week.

Earlier on, the devolved Welsh and Scottish governments, both pretty aggressively secularist and neither very sympathetic on matters of conscience, had given in to a coalition of pressure groups, abortion providers and activists. They made it clear that they would make the change permanent. A couple of weeks ago the House of Lords did the same thing. On a thin vote of 75-35, it passed an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill to do the same for England. Yesterday the House of Commons determined 215-188 to accept that amendment. The result is that the temporary expedient of 2020 is now permanent.

This is dispiriting for lots of reasons. First, even if you do not accept the inherent wrongness of abortion, it wasn’t difficult to see why this was a thoroughly jerry-rigged solution, justifiable if at all only as a very temporary measure. For one thing, once the need for consultation in person was suppressed, the ten-week limit itself became fairly theoretical. Anyone prepared to be economical with the truth could get the pills outside it, and indeed even outside the overall 24-week limit, thus driving a coach and horses through the Act. Complications with home abortions are very possible, and can be more dangerous for those undergoing the process alone at home. Yet again, where there is no need for anything more than a possibly perfunctory phone call to initiate the process, the scope for abusive partners to coerce women undetected into terminations against their own judgment is frightening.

Further, characterising opposition to the Lords amendments as a vote to “restrict access to a vital service for women,” as Wes Streeting did to Labour MPs, is misleading and disingenuous. Pre-Covid it was not seen as a “vital service to women” to facilitate widespread, largely unsupervised DIY abortions under ill-conceived dispensations from the 1967 Act; and this is no more the case after it. The real aim of the activists is to characterise abortion changes in the public mind as a kind of political ratchet: once any change has been made, however temporary, any attempt to wind it back must be resisted as a reactionary attempt to take away the hard-won rights of women.

Thirdly, it’s interesting to see the results of a government consultation on the matter undertaken last year. Stripping out organisational respondents, of the individual responses to the question: “outside of the pandemic do you consider there are benefits or disadvantages in relation to safeguarding and women’s safety in requiring them to make at least one visit to a service to be assessed by a clinician?” the vast majority saw benefits. Asked about the impact of the temporary measures on safety, a majority saw the effects as negative. The evidence for any overwhelming demand for change outside the world of pressure groups is, shall we say, equivocal.

Most importantly, however, all this trivialises the status of abortion as not simply a matter of applying medical science and placating pressure groups, but as an issue of conscience for very large numbers of people in the UK, both Catholic and non-Catholic. One may not like the Abortion Act, but at least it was only passed after a great deal of consideration and soul-searching. The same happened when the limit was reduced from 28 to 24 weeks in 1990, and again with the unsuccessful attempt to reduce it further in 2008.

It seems fairly clear that Wednesday’s pro-abortion activists – many of whom incidentally welcomed the vote with ghoulish glee as the greatest change to abortion laws since 1967 – disliked that kind of extended discussion and saw the pandemic as the perfect opportunity to short-circuit it. What better for that purpose than a carefully-plotted ambush in the House of Lords, followed by a blitz campaign to catch the government off-balance and bounce the Commons into a fait accompli before the opponents could gather their strength? Most of us are very unhappy to see changes in social policy which deeply affect the morals of the country made in that way. Unfortunately some are less scrupulous; and they are the ones who have had their way.

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