Abortion (Foetus Protection) Bill

The Abortion (Foetus Protection) Bill will bring England and Wales in-line with our EU neighbours, with the gestational time limit for most abortions brought down to 12 weeks, leaving abortions beyond this point to be performed under limited circumstances.

• The Bill has been brought forward by Baroness Nicholson, former Director of the Save the Children Foundation, and a former member of the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights. It received a first reading on Wednesday 5 July.
• This Bill will bring the gestational time limit for most abortions, which are performed under section 1(1)(a) of the Abortion Act, down to 12 weeks, bringing it in line with the majority of EU countries that have a time limit for most abortions of 12 weeks or lower (see bottom of page for details).
• The Bill would not affect the time limits for other grounds of the Abortion Act.
  • 1(1)(b) – that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or
  • 1(1)(c) – that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated;
  • 1(1)(d) – that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.
• There is a large amount of public support for reducing the gestational time limit for abortion.
  • A recent ComRes poll found that 70% of women are in favour of reducing the time limit from 24 weeks.
  • Of those that wanted to see the time limit reduced the largest group wanted to see it reduced to 12 weeks or below.
  • The polling also showed that only 1% of women wanted to see an increase in the time limit to birth, demonstrating that there is very little real public support for the abortion lobby’s stated goal to introduce abortion on demand, for any reason, right through to birth.
• At 12 weeks a unborn child is fully formed, has a heartbeat and all the organs, muscles, limbs and bones are in place. The baby’s fingers will soon begin to open and close, her toes will curl, her eye muscles will clench, and her mouth will make sucking movements.
• The latest abortion statistics for England and Wales show that 82.27% of the 180,794 terminations performed under section 1(1)(a) occurred at 9 weeks gestation or earlier.

The BBC have put together details on European time limits in this resource here. We have recently reviewed the time limits stated there to update changes in legislation and put them in the table below.