This would be the single biggest change to abortion legislation since 1967 and would leave England and Wales with one of the most extreme abortion laws in the world.
This change to law would make the Abortion Act (1967) redundant by removing all legal safeguards (many of which protect women) around abortion provided by the Act.
Sex-selective abortion predominantly impacts baby girls, fundamentally undermining all steps that have been taken to ensure equality between both sexes. To ensure that women are treated as being of equal value to men in the UK, we cannot permit sex-selective abortion to take place in any part of the UK.
The proposed law change is radically out of step with the opinions of women on abortion. Polling of over 2,000 British adults from Savanta ComRes on whether time limits for abortion should be increased showed that only 1% of women wanted the time limit to be extended to birth. In contrast, around 70% of women favoured a reduction in time limits from 24 weeks. 91% of women agree that gender-selective abortion should be explicitly banned by the law. This polling shows that women want more, not fewer, safeguards around abortion.
