With Theresa May announcing that she will be officially resigning as Conservative leader on 7 June, a number of Tories have declared that they will be putting their name forward as candidates in the leadership contest which will begin on 10 June. This leadership contest will decide the new leader of the Conservatives and UK’s next Prime Minister.
The contest will take place in two stages. The first stage (shortlisting) involves a series of votes by currently sitting MPs that will decide on the top two candidates. The second stage then involves these two candidates going onto a final vote where the membership of the Conservative party will decide on the winner.
We have put together the following voting record outline which details the voting records on abortion for each of the current leadership candidates. These records come from the Where Do They Stand database, you can view voting records for other MPs on the website here. We will be updating this outline as more candidates but their name forward.
This voting record outline will be useful for MPs who are deciding on which candidates to back along with the party membership when they are deciding on who to vote for from the final two candidates.
We are about to enter a very important period in UK for the abortion issue. Polling shows that there is very strong demand from the public for a range of changes to our abortion laws that would introduce new safeguards and restrictions to increase protections for the unborn child and support for women in crisis pregnancies. There is also currently a strong push from the abortion lobby to introduce abortion on demand to Northern Ireland and make extreme changes to abortion legislation in England and Wales.
It is therefore vitally important that the next Prime Minister is open to supporting positive changes that would improve our abortion laws and that they will also reject pressure from the abortion lobby to make them worse.
Below the voting record outline we have also included links to the full voting record profile for each of the candidates on the Where Do They Stand website. We have included this as it may be difficult to read the details of each of the votes on the voting record outline as we have had to fit in alot of content into a very small space. A description of each of these votes can be clearly read over on the Where Do They Stand website.
Green squares represent the MP casting a pro-life vote, red represents a pro-abortion vote, yellow is an abstention and grey indicates that the MP was not in office at the time of the vote.
- Amendment to put pressure on the Government to change abortion legislation in Northern Ireland – 24/10/2018.
- Introduce abortion on demand, for any reason, up-to 24-weeks in Northern Ireland. Remove many of the current legal safeguards around abortion provision in England and Wales – 23/10/2018.
- Introduce abortion on demand, for any reason, up-to-birth (‘Decriminalisation’) – 13/03/2017.
- Explicit ban on sex-selective abortion – 23/02/2015.
- Independent abortion counselling – 07/09/2011.
- Better information and counselling for parents facing a disability diagnosis in pregnancy – 20/05/2008.
- Reduce abortion limit to 12 weeks – 20/05/2008.
- Reduce abortion limit to 16 weeks – 20/05/2008.
- Reduce abortion limit to 20 weeks – 20/05/2008.
- Reduce abortion limit to 22 weeks – 20/05/2008.
- Counselling and 7-day cooling off period – 05/06/2007.
- Parental notification for girls 15 and under seeking an abortion – 14/03/2007.
