Alliance deputy Dr Stephen Farry plans on adding clause to government protest bill which would fully decriminalise abortion up to birth for any reason

The bill is a hodge-podge of wildly different pieces of would-be law.

Arguably its main thrust is to crack down on what the government calls "disruptive protestors" by banning face coverings, flares, and climbing on war memorials.

But a group of MPs also want to add a clause which would remove women who abort their foetuses from the scope of the criminal law.

They include Tory Caroline Nokes (nicknamed 'Caroline Wokes' by right-wing Twitter), ex-Green leader Caroline Lucas, and Labour's Jess Phillips, plus Mr Farry.

The amendment would "disapply existing criminal law related to the accessing or procurement of abortion care from women acting in relation to their own pregnancy at any gestation, ensuring no woman would be liable for a prison sentence as a result of seeking to end her own pregnancy".

It would achieve this largely by axing the sections of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 which deal with abortion – something which has already happened in Northern Ireland, but not in Great Britain.

While abortion campaigners often point out that the law was passed “before the invention of the lightbulb” and is therefore “out of date”, the same law also governs offences such as soliciting murder, GBH, manslaughter, and indecent assault.

Although laws in both NI and GB generally allow abortions under medical supervision within certain time limits and for certain reasons, women in GB can still be charged under the 1861 act for administering abortions to themselves.

Theoretically, this carries a penalty of life in prison, but in reality the law is barely applied and when it is, the sentences involve little-to-no jail time.

For example, the News Letter had reported repeatedly in recent years on abortion protestors handing out pills to self-induce abortions at home, resulting in no police action.

The Guardian reported in 2022 that, over a span of eight years, there had been 17 police investigations into abortions.

Whenever in 2016 a 21-year-old Belfast woman was charged with using online pills to induce her own abortion (after a housemate found a male body of what she called "a full wee proper baby" in their household bin, aged possibly up to 10 weeks’ gestation), she was granted anonymity and given a three-month suspended sentence.

In June 2023 a woman in England, Carla Foster, was jailed for 14 months for doing the same thing to a foetus at 32-to-34 weeks' gestation (babies are considered 'full term' at 37 weeks and are viable outside the womb from 24 weeks – although the world’s earliest surviving premature baby was born at 21 weeks).

But a few weeks later she was free because her sentence had been commuted to a suspended one, with judge Dame Victoria Sharp saying: "It is a case that calls for compassion, not punishment."

Foster, aged 45, had many political supporters, including Caroline Nokes and Labour's Stella Creasy, whilst Mandu Reid of the feminist Women's Equality Party said: "I am devastated for the woman at the centre of this case, and for her children, who have been forcibly separated from their mum.

"No one deserves to be criminalised for seeking healthcare."

Alliance and Dr Farry were asked to comment on the reasons for supporting the bill and its prospects of success, but no response had been received at time of writing.