How Britain Sleepwalked Into Foreign Abortion Practices

Britain has never been a country that celebrates extremes. Its people argue and grumble about everything, from the weather and train delays to the price of a pint and the size of a biscuit. But when Parliament changes something intimate and irreversible, the public expects caution, consultation, and a basic level of seriousness. Clause 191 of the Crime and Policing Bill fails that test. It is being sold as a neat little “modernisation” of abortion law. In practice, it removes the last legal restraint on a woman ending her own pregnancy at any stage, for any reason, with criminal law switched off for her actions.

Supporters insist this is “limited” because it doesn’t change the 24-week framework for abortions provided in clinical settings, and coercion remains a crime. Fine. Yet the point of Clause 191 is precisely to remove the threat of prosecution for self-managed abortion “at any gestation”. It creates a space where the latest, most dangerous, most contested terminations can happen without legal consequence for the person doing them. The rest of the statute book doesn’t need rewriting to change a country’s moral climate. Removing the final fence is enough.

This is also the kind of change Britons instinctively distrust: slipped into a long bill, debated briefly, and treated like a footnote. Even among those broadly supportive of abortion access, there is deep unease with social surgery carried out at speed. The public preference is simple and sensible. Keep a legal line after 24 weeks. A Whitestone Insight poll found only a small minority back decriminalisation, with a clear majority opposed.

Now add the part nobody wants to say out loud in polite company: sex selection.

The problem already exists. Official birth data points to an abnormal imbalance among third births to Indian mothers in Britain, with ratios rising well beyond what biology produces by chance. Campaigners and analysts argue these figures are consistent with sex-selective practices. The Department of Health and Social Care’s position has long been unequivocal: abortion on the grounds of sex alone is illegal; sex is not a lawful ground under the Abortion Act.

But “illegal” is not the same as impossible, especially when enforcement is weak and cultural realities are ignored. Similar patterns are well documented in parts of the Muslim world, where male preference remains entrenched and female foeticide has distorted demographics for decades. Britain is not immune to importing those pressures, especially at a moment when abortion numbers continue to climb, year after year, reaching record highs. Scale matters.

When the law signals permissiveness, even indirectly, it doesn’t liberate women; if anything, it empowers coercion. In such environments, choice quickly shifts from the mother to the family, the husband, or the wider community. Clause 191 does exactly that. Once the mother’s act is decriminalised, the deterrent shifts. The law’s weight lessens. The evidential trail fades. What is left is a system that claims safeguards while actively abandoning them. The people most likely to suffer aren’t activists in Westminster, but women under pressure at home.

Sex selection is not a British tradition. It isn’t a brave extension of liberty. It’s discrimination dressed up as choice, with a long and ugly record. India’s own government surveys have documented tens of millions of “missing” women, driven in part by sex-selective abortion and unequal care. This has been the case for decades. Serious research has long shown that son preference — and the resulting skewed sex ratios — runs through parts of South and East Asia and the Middle East. This is precisely why Britain drew a legal boundary in the first place. The state can respect autonomy while refusing to legitimise targeted destruction.

The nonsensical claim that such cases are too rare to matter misses the point. They matter even if they number in the hundreds. They matter because the principle is corrosive. The moment a society shrugs at girls being consciously filtered out because a family wanted a boy, progress has reversed.

The irony is brutal. The loudest defenders of liberal abortion law spent decades warning about dangerous, unsupervised terminations. Clause 191 invites precisely that scenario at the point of highest risk: late pregnancy, at home, alone, using pills designed for early use. The closer a pregnancy is to viability, the greater the need for medicine rather than messaging.

There is also a distinctly British value being discarded: protection of the vulnerable. The law has long attempted — imperfectly — to hold two truths at once: women shouldn’t be treated as criminals for being in crisis, and viable unborn children aren’t disposable property. Clause 191 dissolves that balance.

This is about refusing to turn Britain into a place where anything goes, right up to birth, for any reason, with the state acting as if nothing of consequence has occurred. Most Britons do not want that. They may disagree fiercely about abortion at twelve weeks, sixteen, or twenty-four. But there remains a widely shared recognition that a line exists between early termination and ending a viable life in the final stretch. That instinct is admirable and humane.

If Parliament intends to change something this foundational, it should do so honestly: a dedicated bill, full debate, proper scrutiny, and public daylight. Not a stealth clause that loosens the law exactly where cultural coercion and sex selection are most likely to thrive.