As a nation waits anxiously for a High Court ruling on the constitutionality of its restrictive 1861 abortion law, a recent legislative move across England has drawn renewed attention to the injustice of outdated criminal penalties for reproductive healthcare. In a significant act of accountability, the UK Parliament has passed new legislation that will clear the criminal records of every woman convicted of abortion or attempted abortion under laws dating back to the 1800s. This step marks a formal acknowledgment by the British government that criminalizing women’s access to abortion was a misguided, ineffective, deeply unfair, and cruel policy that caused unnecessary harm to generations of people.
England first decriminalized most abortions nearly six decades ago, in 1967, marking the first major break from a punitive approach to reproductive care. Shifting from criminal prosecution to public health-focused regulation has yielded measurable positive results: England currently reports an abortion rate of 23 per 1000 women, far lower than the 59 per 1000 rate recorded in the nation still clinging to its 1861 law. Now, almost 60 years after decriminalization, England is addressing the lingering harm of its former policy: clearing past convictions will lift the lifelong stigma and professional barriers that came with permanent criminal records, which for decades barred affected women from career advancement and caused deep emotional distress.
Advocacy group ASPIRE, which authored this open letter calling for reform, points out that the push to strike down the outdated domestic abortion law is not an unprecedented demand. Forty years ago, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1988 case R v Morgentaler that an abortion law nearly identical to the 1861 law currently in place here was unconstitutional. More recently, in 2017, Northern Ireland’s Court of Appeal found that the abortion-related provisions of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act were incompatible with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Despite gaining political independence in 1981, this nation chose to retain the 1861 Victorian-era abortion law inherited from its colonial past, a policy that remains in place as of 2026. ASPIRE urges the domestic High Court to follow the examples set by Canada, Northern Ireland, and now England, breaking with the culture of punitive approaches to reproductive healthcare and issuing a ruling that declares the current restrictive abortion law unconstitutional.