Peers also rejected a bid to make it mandatory for a pregnant woman to have an in-person consultation before lawfully being prescribed medicine for the termination of a pregnancy at home.<\/p>\n
Tory peer Baroness Stroud said her amendment to require an in-person appointment “would ensure medical professionals can accurately assess a woman’s gestational age, any health risks and the risk of coercion before abortion pills are prescribed”.<\/p>\n
Under the current law it is legal to take prescribed medication at home if a woman is less than 10 weeks pregnant.<\/p>\n
The Government changed the regulations during the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, to allow women to have medical abortions at home following a phone or video consultation.<\/p>\n
This change was made permanent in 2022, so women can take pills at home for gestation of up to nine weeks and six days.<\/p>\n
House of Lords rejected the bid to move back to compulsory in-person consultations by 191 votes to 119.<\/p>\n
Pro choice and pro life campaigners brought banners and placards to the House of Lords as peers arrived for the debate.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC, pro life campaigner Sarah said: “We need to protect the unborn child in the womb and we also need to protect women from abortion because abortion harms women as well as their children.<\/p>\n
“I believe that every child, from the moment of conception, is valuable in the eyes of God and I don’t believe that there are any situations that really allow abortion, because we’re not the ones that give life and we’re not the ones that should take it away either.<\/p>\n
“I’ve struggled to conceive – I’ve been married 15 years – so it’s very difficult to see so many lives lost by abortion when I would have gladly taken any one of them into my family.”<\/p>\n
Pro choice campaigner Louise McCudden told the BBC she believed it was “unacceptable” for women in England and Wales to still be subject to a Victorian law created before women had the right to vote.<\/p>\n
McCudden, who works for abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices UK, said: “We know from providing reproductive healthcare across six continents that criminalisation harms women and makes abortion less safe.<\/p>\n
“The House of Lords now has a historic opportunity to end the threat of prosecution once and for all, pardon women who have been previously convicted, and drop ongoing investigations. <\/p>\n
“At a time when we are seeing rollbacks in reproductive rights around the world, most notably in the US, it’s encouraging that our parliament is standing up for women.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Peers also rejected a bid to make it mandatory for a pregnant woman to have an in-person consultation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-483972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}