Abortion laws aren’t working – no woman should feel like a criminal for making choices about her body

Abortion is ancient history – literally. The earliest written record of the practice dates back more than 4,000 years to an Egyptian papyrus which describes methods by which women could induce abortions.

Yet today, in England and other countries across the world, the ever-shifting legal landscape of abortion access continues to threaten the lives of women and their rights over what they can and cannot do with their bodies.

This week is no exception; abortion rights are back in the spotlight in England. An amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, proposed by Labour MP Diana Johnson, to prevent the prosecution of women in England and Wales who end a pregnancy outside of the terms of the Abortion Act (1967) is getting further delayed and tweaked.

It’s easy for the important things to get lost amid this typical, politicised narrative around abortion. So, while politicians argue the technicalities and legalities about the number of permitted weeks, foetal abnormalities and sentencing, two things must not go unnoticed.

One is that a young woman in England who was 19 years old at the time of her alleged illegal abortion currently faces a prison sentence, and the other is that our ability as a society to have meaningful discussions about the lived experience of abortion and to take care of women during the process is still being severely damaged by the heavily politicised narrative that dominates the news cycle.

This week my debut poetry collection, Slip – the first ever to focus on the abortion experience – will be published.

I wrote it because from the moment I decided to get an abortion through to the years following the termination, I found myself slipping into a grief caused by the troubling silence around abortion in both literature and in our society in general. I went on to spend years studying for an MA and now a PhD to grapple with why that silence might exist.

With the book I wanted to normalise the normal, because abortion is normal – as normal as getting a tattoo or women getting sexually harassed on their commute to work, so why should it feel so risky or unusual to talk about it?

In Slip I wanted to talk openly and honestly about how it felt for me to get an abortion in the hope that other people might feel accepted and able to do the same because I believe that when people talk honestly about their experiences they create space for others to process what they’ve been through and to heal.

But do you know what gets in the way of honesty? Shame. And when it comes to abortion, our society hands out shame in bucketfuls.

It would be easy to think that it’s always been this way. It would be easy to wonder: why all the fuss about abortion rights here in England when abortions can be accessed with relative ease? And it might be easy to conclude that abortion is an act which inherently carries with it a certain sense of shame and guilt anyway.

But this isn’t true. Abortion is as old as pregnancy and throughout history, women have always found ways to end unwanted pregnancies. Regulating fertility is a natural occurrence and one which, before the relatively recent advent of restrictive abortion laws and bans, women were able to support each other through.

Today the everyday reality of the matter is so often caught up in the usual debates as people move around the same old black-and-white chess board of polarised anti-abortion and pro-choice arguments, while women struggle to get the support and acceptance they may need following a termination.

It is currently a criminal offence in England, Wales and Scotland for a woman to obtain her own abortion. It is only legal if two doctors agree that the woman meets the various requirements of the Abortion Act.

Outside of these factors, a woman is open to prosecution and some of the harshest penalties for abortion in the world. But why is the decriminalisation of abortion so important? After all, whether or not women terminate pregnancies hasn’t changed throughout history – they simply do and always will, regardless of the laws.

What has changed over time though is how abortion is interpreted and handled. Criminalisation creates shame. The first reference to abortion restrictions in England appeared in the 13th century and followed the church’s teachings at the time which determined that abortion after the “quickening” must carry the death penalty. These and subsequent restrictive laws encouraged a culture of judgement over the choices of others; of stigma and shame.

The only way to truly begin healing the significant damage caused by this stigmatisation is to decriminalise abortion. Only once the threat of criminal conviction to vulnerable women has been removed can abortion be treated as the healthcare concern it is with the care and compassion women deserve.

I believe that no woman should leave an abortion clinic feeling like a criminal – but this will continue to be the case until abortion is decriminalised here as it already is in Northern Ireland, allowing a woman to end her own pregnancy without the fear of being prosecuted.

We must recognise that the laws aren’t working and ask who such strict prosecutions really serve. Ultimately, abortion laws give the impression that abortion is a criminal, unnatural practice. It isn’t. Women have been having abortions for as long as they’ve been getting pregnant.

And that’s the thing – the history of abortion does not belong to the courts as we are often led to believe. In fact, abortion has continued no matter what laws and punishments governments have thrown at women and healthcare providers in order to try and stop it. The history of abortion belongs to women, who have always found ways to assume responsibility for their own bodies and who can and should still be trusted to do so.

Amelia Loulli will be in conversation discussing her debut collection, ‘Slip’, at the Vagina Museum on 23 May at 7-9pm. Tickets are available here