Editorial: Court ruling overturning jail term for woman in illegal abortion case could make it harder to prohibit any terminations at all

A woman jailed for taking abortion pills late in her pregnancy will be freed.​Carla Foster, 45, from Staffordshire had admitted procuring her own abortion when she was around 33 weeks pregnant. She was sentenced to 28 months in jail, half on licence. Three judges in the Court of Appeal in London – Dame Victoria Sharp, Lord Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Lambert – yesterday cut that to 14 months suspended.

The case is, as the appeal judges say, no doubt "a very sad" one. The circumstances might, as they also said, call "for compassion, not punishment" – or a degree of such. But this ruling raises doubt as to whether it is possible in the UK to put criminal sanction on illegal abortions if carried out by the mother (an abortionist acting secretly would probably be imprisoned).

For many people abortion is straightforward: at one end of the spectrum any abortion after conception is a grave moral crime. At the other, abortion the day before birth is acceptable. But many people struggle with questions such as whether it is legitimate to terminate a pregnancy in cases where the mother was raped or the foetus suffers severe, life-limiting disability.

Think though what it means if a blind eye is turned to an abortion as late in a pregnancy as this one, barely a month before full term – and long past the stage where it is viable outside the womb. It will mean that a mother denied one of the exempted abortions after the legal term expires (currently 24 weeks) knows she can take drugs without serious sanction.

The case of Carla Foster is a fraught one. But some campaigners who want abortion to be decriminalised talk as if no abortion, at any time, is wrong. It is hard to get doctors to perform abortions after 16 weeks, so revolting is the procedure. An abortion at twice that gestation is all the more hideous.