Alliance for Choice
Free, Safe, Legal, Local Abortion For Everyone Who Needs It
Feminists for reproductive liberation and against gender policing
Monday 16 June 2025
The co-signed represent a coalition of feminist activists, advocates, researchers and directly affected people whose focus is reproductive liberation for everyone.
We renew our promise to be here for each other. For us, feminism is a liberating social movement that holds up all women and all those who can become pregnant, and all those who make everyday life liveable, when valuing the contributions of women and gender diverse people to the world.
We draw strength from earlier generations of feminists who taught us how to make each other free. We persist in building cross-community shelter in our organisations and working for a world where everyone is fed, housed, loved and heard. We reject the capitalist war machine that is destroying life in Gaza and on the planet. We are committed to defending our communities from the dangerous gender/race/class policing that is attacking the fabric of social life in the UK and elsewhere.
Through our work and life experience we know that meaningful change on abortion requires tackling injustice for all life’s reproducers. We challenge injustice for trans and gender diverse people, migrants, those in poverty, those who are racialised and otherwise marginalised and people who are underserved by our health systems and social welfare supports. This statement draws on that experience and knowledge in responding to recent calls for decriminalisation of abortion in England and Wales.
We welcome proposals (including amendment NC1) to reduce the criminalisation of reproductive lives by taking abortion-seekers out of the criminal law, but we believe full decriminalisation is necessary to ensure equal protection for all.
The willingness to prosecute, and sentence, pregnant people for becoming unpregnant is a shameful indictment of contemporary Britain. Radical action is needed to ensure that pregnant people are cared for and not criminalised.
NC1’s proposed partial decriminalisation does some of what is needed by providing that ‘no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy’ for the purpose of the law related to abortion. Women and pregnant people, like Nicola Packer, would no longer be investigated, prosecuted, and/or convicted for abortion-related offences if this amendment became law. But the amendment leaves the criminal abortion law in place, and it does not prevent those who provide abortion, such as health care practitioners, or those who help others to access abortion, such as friends, siblings and community volunteers, from being investigated for abortion-related offences.
The experience of partial decriminalisation has taught us that decriminalisation must apply to all those affected if pregnant people and all life’s reproducers are to become free. In Ireland the promise of radical change has been chilled by a criminal law which exempts pregnant people but threatens abortion providers and supporters with a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. Before decriminalisation in Northern Ireland, the police raided activist houses and places and seized computers (McDonald, 2017). In Poland, those who conscientiously commit to providing abortion outside of statutory provision are regularly arrested as they cannot arrest abortion seekers directly (Weronika Strzyżyńska, 2023). Here, decriminalised sex workers have been made unsafe by laws which criminalise clients and brothels. We urge parliamentarians and the people who vote for them to move beyond NC1 and call for abortion’s full decriminalisation.
We appreciate efforts (including amendment NC20) to hold abortion care to the highest standards of human rights. We believe participatory rights forums, such as the CEDAW inquiry in Northern Ireland, can do important locally-led work in bringing people together to work through the practicalities of making abortion care more rights compatible.
Through rights work we bring legal and policy standards alive and make them accountable to our communities. We join with sibling rights workers across the world in engaging with CEDAW, the World Health Organisation and other international bodies in fleshing out rights commitments. Both CEDAW and the WHO call for full decriminalisation of abortion as a minimum standard of care necessary to secure respect for pregnant people’s rights and health. We believe that England and Wales has much to learn from rights work in and beyond Northern Ireland and the Global South. Rights work can push, and has pushed, back against criminalisation and in favour of socio-economic support for local communities.
The United Nations CEDAW treaty was ratified by the UK Government in 1986 and now it is the UK’s parliamentary duty to ensure those rights are applied equally from Derry to Dundee to Dyffryn and Dover. The rights inquiries in Northern Ireland fleshed out a participatory legal pathway which made possible the 2019 repeal of abortion’s criminal offences and the 2020 adoption of regulations legalising abortion. The Northern Irish regulations go beyond CEDAW’s minimum thresholds (of abortion provision in circumstances of risk to health, rape, and foetal anomaly) by guaranteeing abortion on request up to 12 weeks, and consistent with the Abortion Act’s grounds and CEDAW’s thresholds after 12 weeks. We hope that parliamentarians and the people that vote for them will move beyond NC20 and come to participate in making rights to bodily autonomy a reality in and beyond England and Wales.
As feminists for reproductive liberation, we cannot support the Crime and Policing Bill as the means of achieving abortion’s partial or full decriminalisation.
If the proposed amendments were successful, they would need the Bill, which they amend, to be adopted to have effect. And this is a Bill which offends reproductive justice deeply by strengthening policing powers, criminalising poverty and weakening protest rights. If anything it will increase the need for abortion by making pregnancy even less supportable, particularly in communities already feeling the brunt of government cuts and racialised policing. The Bill is an affront to reproductive justice and ‘the responsibility we have to secure each other’s health and happiness.’
We urge MPs and all those living with English and Welsh law to take a more holistic approach and avoid using legal change, including decriminalisation, as a quick fix for a single issue. Only when our communities are free from the kind of policing that is endorsed by this Bill, only when we are free to make each other free, will we be able to realise decriminalisation, rights and justice for all.
We call for abortion’s full decriminalisation, for the extension of rights to bodily autonomy to pregnant people and all life’s reproducers in and beyond England and Wales, and for support of communities that care for, not police, each other.
Further Information:
Current abortion reform proposals
The two legislative amendments which could bring about legal change on abortion are known as NC1 and NC20. NC1, proposed by Tonia Antoniazzi, and NC20, proposed by Stella Creasy may be found in the Amendment Paper of 10 June 2025, to be considered for selection in the House of Commons on 17 and 18th June (see further the updates on the Crime and Policing Bill 2024-25 (Publications). It is possible that the Speaker will not pick either amendment and that abortion’s decriminalisation will need to await a future parliamentary intervention.
One MP’s account: https://parliamentnews.co.uk/how-do-we-decriminalise-abortion
Northern Irish rights processes for decriminalisation
There were four inquiries in Northern Ireland in the run up to decriminalisation in 2019. These inquiries specifically engaged with stakeholders, medical professionals, politicians, civil society, and statutory bodies. They were, in chronological order with the most recent first:
CEDAW Inquiry - The CEDAW (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women - United Nations) report was the result of extensive community consultation in Northern Ireland. In its report, the Committee concludes that a restriction affecting only women from exercising reproductive choice, involves mental and physical suffering constituting violence against women. It also potentially amounts to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of several articles of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. They concluded that forcing a woman to continue with her pregnancy in such a situation amounted to unjustifiable State-sanctioned violence. http://www.alliance4choice.com/news/2018/2/the-situation-in-northern-ireland-constitutes-violence-against-women-cedaw-inquiry
British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly (BIPA) Inquiry
This cross-jurisdictional inquiry heard from Government representatives, academic, medical and legal experts, and campaigners representing all points of view on the issue. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/westminster-could-legalise-abortion-in-northern-ireland-labour-peer-38112119.htmlWomen and Equalities Committee Inquiry on Abortion in Northern Ireland - who said:
“We have visited Northern Ireland twice and heard from a large number of witnesses, professionals, stakeholders and individuals impacted by the law in three different locations, as well as in Westminster.” http://www.alliance4choice.com/repeal-58/59/2019/4/afc-response-to-women-and-equalities-committee-inquiry-on-abortion-in-northern-irelandAll Party Parliamentary Inquiry on Population, Development and Reproductive Health (APPG) on abortion in Northern Ireland http://www.appg-popdevrh.org.uk/APPG%202018%20AW.PDF
Community work in support of all reproductive lives
https://www.alliance4choice.com/meet-the-team
https://www.asn.org.uk/hope-is-a-doing-word/
https://www.asn.org.uk/abortion-funds-and-the-work-of-rehearsing-reproductive-freedoms/
https://www.adiyah.community/about-adiyah
https://www.adiyah.community/news/blog-post-title-one-a6llr-h7n9n-24ekm
https://decrimnow.org.uk/hookers-against-hardship/
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/decriminalizing-abortion-in-northern-ireland-9781350278912/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10691-018-9396-x
Signed
Organisation Name
Ad’iyah
Abortion Support Network
Alliance for Choice Belfast
Reproductive Justice Initiative
Supporting Abortions for Everyone - SAFE
Dr. Sandra Duffy, Lecturer in Law, University of Bristol Law School
Dr. Ruth Fletcher, Queen Mary University, Law
Rhiannon Lockley, UCU Equality Chair (personal capacity)
email: Alliance for Choice to add signature - Individuals and Organisational signatures welcome