Abortion in the United Kingdom is regulated under the terms of the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain and the Abortion (Northern Ireland) (No.2) Regulations 2020 in Northern Ireland. Across the United Kingdom, abortion is permitted on the grounds of: risk to the life of the pregnant woman; preventing grave permanent injury to her physical or mental health; risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family (up to a term limit of 24 weeks of gestation); or substantial risk that, if the child were born, they would "suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped".
The third ground is typically interpreted liberally with regards to mental health to create a de facto elective abortion service; 98% of the approximately quarter-million abortions performed each year in Great Britain are done so for that reason. In Northern Ireland since 2020, abortion is also permitted within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy for any reason.
Under the UK's devolution settlements, abortion policy is devolved to the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, but not to the Welsh Parliament (Senedd). Abortion was previously highly restricted in Northern Ireland although it was permitted in limited cases. In 2019, during a time when the Assembly was not operating, the UK Parliament repealed most restrictions on abortion in Northern Ireland; the current Regulations were subsequently introduced by Parliament in 2020.
Abortions which are carried out for grounds outside those permitted in law (e.g. in most cases after the 24-week term limit, or where appropriate consent has not been given) continue to be unlawful in each jurisdiction of the UK – under the Offences against the Person Act 1861 in England and Wales, Scottish common law and the Northern Ireland Regulations. The Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 and the Criminal Justice Act (Northern Ireland) 1945 also outlaw child destruction in cases outside the grounds permitted in abortion law. After several high-profile and controversial prosecutions of women in the 2020s, a current bill progressing through Parliament will also decriminalise a woman procuring her own abortion in England and Wales.
History Debates and practices relating to abortion, pregnancy and the beginning of human life are recorded in Roman medical literature which would have been become available in Roman Britain from the 1st century AD onwards. The medical writer Soranus of Ephesus, for example, wrote in the early 2nd century:
Similar issues would also have been discussed in Celtic culture, although written Celtic texts were only available from around the 4th century. An early Christian understanding of preventing abortion and infanticide, as outlined in the 1st-century Didache and similar writings, would have been known in the early British Church which experienced more freedom and influence following Constantine's Edict of Milan in AD 313, and also in the early Irish Church after it was founded by Patrick around AD 432.
Alongside this cultural change in Roman society, a more significant sense of value was associated with the life (and death) of infant and neo-natal children. Several studies of the burials of children who died before or close to the time of birth in Roman Britain have been made, and the presence of neo-natal burials given the same burial rites as adults is "a pointer to identification of the cemetery as Christian" as such burials were rare before the 4th century.
Care for abandoned or unwanted children, such as kinship care within families and friendship circles, and the adoption and fostering of alumni, were also well-established in Roman society. In the early Middle Ages, in Britain and other regions of Northern Europe, parents who did not want to raise their children often gave them to monasteries along with a small fee – a practice known as oblation.
Abortion was mainly dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts until their abolition during the Reformation. These cases were generally assigned to the ecclesiastical courts due to problems of evidence; the courts had wider evidential rules and more discretion regarding sentencing. A number of cases such as the Twinslayers Case, in England in 1327, were heard in the secular courts as part of the common law. Later, under Scottish common law, abortion was defined as a criminal offence unless performed for "reputable medical reasons", a definition which could be interpreted as sufficiently broad as to essentially preclude prosecution.
Early statute and modern case law The legality of abortion, and the value of the lives of pregnant women and unborn children, in common law was discussed by several English jurists from the Middle Ages onwards, including Henry Bracton, William Stanford, Edward Coke and William Blackstone. For example, Blackstone wrote in his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England:
Shortly after his appointment as Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough, codified abortion as an offence in statute law, in England and Wales and Ireland, through the Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act 1803, which became known as Lord Ellenborough's Act. This legislation and the subsequent acts in the 19th century did not apply to Scotland due to its separate legal system based on common law.
The 1803 Act introduced capital punishment for wilfully, maliciously, and unlawfully administering "any deadly poison, or other noxious and destructive substance or thing, with intent[...] to cause and procure the miscarriage of any woman, then being quick with child" (section 1) and penalties, at the discretion of the court, up to and including penal transportation for using means to "cause the miscarriage of any woman not being, or not being proved to be, quick with child" (section 2).
The offences created by the 1803 Act were consolidated in the first Offences Against the Person Act, introduced by Robert Peel and enacted for England in 1828, which outlined the same offences and punishments (section 13). The same consolidation took place in Irish law through the Offences Against the Person (Ireland) 1829 (section 16). Both Acts were replaced by the Offences Against the Person Act 1837, which created a single abortion offence without a distinction around a pregnant woman being quick with child or not, and also repealed the death penalty for causing an abortion.
The law was again consolidated through the Offences against the Person Act 1861, which continues to be the main legislation for prosecuting personal injury in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Act created two offences – administering drugs or using instruments to procure abortion (section 58), which replaced the previous legislation from 1839 and allowed for a sentence of life imprisonment; and procuring drugs, or any other means, to cause abortion (section 59) with a potential sentence of three years' imprisonment. The content of the 1861 Act was applied in colonial legislation throughout the British Empire in subsequent years e.g. the Offences Against the Person Act 1866 in New Zealand.
Alongside legislation against abortion, philanthropy encouraged more formal and organised arrangements to care for children born from unwanted pregnancies through the initiatives of social reformers; examples included the orphanage movement (which included the Foundling Hospital, London, in 1739); the pioneering of foster care in Cheshire in 1853 by John Armistead; and the Adoption of Children Act 1926, for England and Wales.
In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, abortifacents were discreetly advertised for women with unwanted pregnancies who were seeking abortions; there was also a considerable body of folklore about inducing miscarriages. So-called 'backstreet' abortionists using methods such as these were relatively common although their efforts could be fatal. Estimates of the number of illegal abortions varied widely; by one estimate, 100,000 women made efforts to procure an abortion in 1914, usually by drugs.Szreter; Fisher
The criminality of abortion in England and Wales was reaffirmed in 1929, when the Infant Life (Preservation) Act was passed; the Act criminalised the deliberate destruction of a child "capable of being born alive". This was to close a lacuna in the law, identified by the former High Court judge Charles Darling, 1st Baron Darling, which allowed for infants to be killed during birth, thus meaning that the perpetrator could neither be prosecuted for abortion or murder. The Act included the presumption that all children in utero over 28 weeks of gestation were capable of being born alive. Where the life of child in utero was ended before this gestation, evidence was presented and considered to determine whether or not the child was capable of being born alive.
The Abortion Law Reform Association, an abortion rights lobbying group, was formed in 1936.
In 1938 the decision in R v. BourneR v Bourne 1 KB 687, 3 All ER 615, Court of Criminal Appeal allowed for further considerations to be taken into account. This case related to an abortion performed on a girl who had been raped, and extended the defence to abortion to include "mental and physical wreck" (Lord Justice McNaghtan). The gynaecologist concerned, Aleck Bourne, later became a founder member of the anti-abortion group the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) in 1966.
In 1939 the Inter-Departmental Committee on Abortion, established by the Home Office and Ministry of Health, recommended a change to abortion laws but the intervention of World War II meant that all plans were shelved. Post-war, after decades of stasis, certain high-profile tragedies, including disability in unborn children caused by the thalidomide drug, and social changes brought the issue of abortion back into the political arena.
Westminster's responsibility for criminal justice and health policy, including around abortion, on the island of Ireland was transferred to the Northern Ireland Parliament (on its formation in 1921) and the Parliament of the Irish Free State (formed in December 1922). Both legislatures took an essentially conservative position, viewing abortion as an offence against the person, or an offence of child destruction, in line with existing legislation in England and Wales.
The 1967 Act
The Abortion Act 1967 sought to clarify the law in Britain. Introduced by David Steel and subject to heated debate, it allowed for legal abortion on a number of grounds, with the added protection of free provision through the National Health Service. The Act was passed on 27 October 1967 and came into effect on 27 April 1968. Pdf.
Before the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 amended the Act, the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929 acted as a buffer to the Abortion Act 1967. This meant that abortions could not be carried out if the child was "capable of being born alive". There was therefore no statutory limit put into the Abortion Act 1967, the limit being that which the courts decided as the time at which a child could be born alive. The C v S case in 1987 confirmed that, at that time, between 19 and 22 weeks a foetus was not capable of being born alive. The 1967 Act required that the procedure must be certified by two doctors before being performed.
Proposals since 1967: Great Britain During each Parliament, several private member's bills are generally introduced to seek to amend the law in relation to abortion. In the years following a supportive report in favour of the 1967 Act by the Lane Committee in 1974, Members of Parliament introduced four bills which have resulted in substantive debate in the House of Commons (votes are indicated in brackets with ayes followed by noes):
Abortion (Amendment) Bill 1975 – referred to a select committee (260–125); Abortion (Amendment) Bill 1976 – referred to select committee (313–172);