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The United Kingdom’s radical decision to decriminalize abortion up to birth will likely spark a pro-life movement similar to the one in the United States, Welsh political commentator Sarah Vine argued this week.
On June 17, Parliament voted 379-137 to decriminalize abortion, stripping away critical legal protections for unborn children. Catholic leaders and pro-life advocates decried the measure as a direct assault on both women and unborn children, CatholicVote reported. While most abortions after 24 weeks technically remain illegal, law enforcement can no longer prosecute or investigate women who obtain abortions up to birth.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Vine condemned the decision as “morally indefensible,” accusing Parliament of authorizing the “state-sanctioned killing of foetuses that would be entirely viable if they were allowed to be born.”
While acknowledging she is “by no means anti-abortion,” Vine sharply criticized Parliament for erasing even the most basic boundaries.
“Women have a right to autonomy over their bodies,” she wrote. “But like all these things, there are limits – moral and medical.”
Vine traced the rapid expansion of abortion availability to pandemic-era policies that stripped away medical safeguards, allowing women to obtain abortion pills remotely, without any in-person supervision.
She warned that this telemedicine model invites abuse, pointing out that while only three women had faced prosecution for illegal abortions in the previous 160 years, six prosecutions have already occurred since the remote pill policy took effect.
Vine also rejected efforts to frame the debate as a question of “women’s rights,” insisting that abortion is fundamentally a human rights issue. She singled out Labour Member of Parliament Tonia Antoniazzi, who spearheaded the decriminalization amendment and is now pushing to extend legal immunity even further for abortion providers and partners involved.
“This is precisely the sort of insanity that gives feminism a bad name,” Vine wrote. “Because, of course, the whole issue has been re-framed as a question of ‘women’s rights’, which it is most emphatically not. It’s a human rights issue: the right of one human to life – versus another’s right to take it without fear of repercussion.”
Rather than expanding abortion access, Vine urged Parliament to confront failures within the UK’s adoption system, which she argued leaves many childless couples unable to adopt newborns.
“There are plenty of childless couples desperate for a newborn who would be only too grateful,” she wrote. “Adoption in this country is complicated and mired in red tape. Why doesn’t Parliament vote to resolve that problem instead?”
Concluding, Vine argued that such sweeping liberalization could ultimately backfire politically:
“One thing’s for certain. If the Left want to provoke a hardline pro-life movement of the kind that exists in the US, yesterday’s vote was an excellent start.”
