Much has changed since I first started interviewing MPs about abortion. Most strikingly, in July 2019 Parliament voted to require the government to act to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland. Parliament has also considered two separate Bills aimed at repealing sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (OAPA) – and therefore the removal of criminal sanctions associated with abortion in the rest of the UK – and hosted an emergency debate on the same topic (Hansard, 2017; 2018a; 2018b) (see Table 7.1). As backbencher initiatives, these had little hope of changing the law, but the cross-party support they enjoyed is surprising, given that until recently MPs felt it would be unwise to rock the boat by agitating for radical reforms. The case for reform was, in part, galvanized by the increasing ability and willingness of women to access abortion pills online, bypassing bricks-and-mortar clinics. But it was accelerated by the success of the Repeal the Eighth campaign in the Republic of Ireland, which culminated in Irish citizens voting to remove a 1983 amendment to the Irish constitution recognising the equal right to life of the pregnant woman and the ‘unborn’. This in turn put the spotlight on the near-total criminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland. For once, the future of abortion rights in Northern Ireland became closely linked to that of abortion rights in Britain in parliamentary debate, as pro-choice MPs and campaigners began to blame the situation not on the failure to extend the Abortion Act 1967 to Northern Ireland, but on the criminal sanctions required under OAPA. Repealing the relevant sections of OAPA would remove these criminal sanctions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (OAPA does not apply in Scotland, where abortion is a common law offence).

As the goals and tactics of pro-choicers shifted, so did those of antiabortion activists. The longstanding claim that abortion harms women found a new – and perhaps more resonant than ever before – iteration in the form of claims that female foetuses were being aborted on a large scale in South Asian communities. While heavily contested, these claims were leveraged in support of attempts to further restrict legal access to abortion, and continue to be used to undermine calls for decriminalization.