The aim of this chapter is to think through the significance of motherhood and the reproductive body for women's lives and social status and, in doing so, to demonstrate the radical potential held by access to safe and legal abortion. The classic arguments regarding the ‘status of the foetus’ (a life or not a life? A person or not a person?) are well-rehearsed and will not be visited in this chapter. Rather, the chapter explores the social significance of reproductive choice. This provides the necessary context for understanding how and why legislators intervene in reproduction, why British abortion regulation has taken the form that it has, and what it means when feminists enter the debate.

This chapter's argument is that access to abortion, alongside access to contraception, is potentially liberatory in that it undoes the association of female embodiment with inevitable motherhood: instead, it presents the possibility that motherhood can be active, engaged, a choice. The ability to delay or reject motherhood altogether opens an array of possibilities to women in terms of employment and education. As such, most feminists view legal abortion as a vital step in achieving gender equality. However, these are only potential implications of legal abortion. In practice, the liberatory potential of abortion can be constrained in many ways, most pertinently through regulatory systems that reinforce motherhood (Orr, 2017: 108– 9) and oblige women to submit to medical authority in the abortion decision and, through racist, classist and ableist social systems that value certain (white, middle-class, ablebodied) women's reproduction while discouraging – or even forcibly preventing – others from reproducing.

These insights are not new, and this chapter draws heavily on excellent work already done by feminist theorists starting with Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the more recent work of feminist legal and policy scholars. However, it argues that a reproductive justice approach that acknowledges intersecting systems such as race and class can add to analysis of UK abortion law and politics. The mainstream reproductive rights movement has extremely valuable insights regarding the sexist basis of British abortion law and the role played by medical authorities in regulating abortion – insights that are now serving it well in the push for full decriminalization.