NUNTIATORIA

Stella Creasy’s Bid to Dismantle the Last Legal Protections for the Unborn

Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour MP for Gower, tabled an amendment last week to the Crime and Policing Bill to decriminalise the abortion process without “changing anything about provision of abortion care”. MP Stella Creasy wants to go further, not merely at repealing abortion’s criminal status, but at enshrining abortion as a legal “human right.” In a Guardian column, Creasy wrote triumphantly:¹

“This week we will lay an alternative amendment to the policing bill that doesn’t just repeal the antiquated criminal law and free women from the threat of prosecution. It also puts in place a plan for what happens next – an explicit human rights framework to ensure safe access and prevent the rolling back of abortion rights, whoever is in power.”

Nearly 60 MPs from Labour, the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Green Party and Plaid Cymru have put their names to Antoniazzi’s amendment. This attempt to insulate abortion from future democratic challenge marks the most aggressive legislative move since the 1967 Abortion Act. But to understand the danger of what is proposed, one must revisit the foundation Creasy seeks to destroy.

The 1861 Act: Legal Recognition of the Unborn Child’s Dignity

Contrary to Creasy’s claim, the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 is not an anachronism rooted in scientific ignorance, but a solemn legal expression of the sanctity of life. It criminalised abortion not as an outdated misunderstanding of biology but as a rational conclusion from moral first principles. Human life, in the legal and moral vision of that Act, is not granted by the State—it is recognised and protected from its very beginning.

The law treated unborn children as members of the human family, not potential persons but persons with potential—already possessed of an intrinsic moral worth. It recognised that human life does not begin when it is convenient, visible, or wanted, but at the moment of conception, when a unique and unrepeatable human identity comes into being. This was no speculative guess of pre-scientific ignorance: by 1861, embryology was well established enough for jurists to appreciate the continuity of human development from conception to birth.

Far from a relic of Victorian biology, the 1861 Act built upon a longstanding legal and moral tradition. As early as the 1803 Lord Ellenborough’s Act, abortion had been criminalised in both the pre- and post-quickening phases of pregnancy, reflecting the common law understanding that unborn life deserved protection under law. English jurists like Sir William Blackstone affirmed that the law recognised the unborn as possessing a moral status, with life beginning “as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother’s womb.”² While Blackstone referred to “quickening” as a juridical milestone, the principle was broader: that justice must extend its shield to the most defenceless.

The 1861 Act codified these principles into statute, imposing life imprisonment for anyone who sought to destroy unborn life. This was not merely to protect women from unsafe procedures (though that was acknowledged), but to uphold the principle that the unborn child was a human being entrusted to the community’s protection. This view remained widespread in parliamentary discourse well into the 20th century. During the debates surrounding the 1967 Abortion Act, for example, Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas observed:

“The child in the womb is not a mere growth or a part of the mother’s body. It is a separate human life entrusted to our protection.”³

This recognition of the unborn as a distinct member of the human family has persisted not only in the moral and legal theory of the past, but even in contemporary criminal law practice. In cases where a pregnant woman is murdered and her unborn child also dies, prosecutors have increasingly pursued double homicide charges.⁴ This is not a sentimental gesture—it is a juridical acknowledgment that two lives have been unjustly taken. In English law, though inconsistently applied, this dual protection further underscores the internal contradiction of a system that punishes violence against the unborn in some contexts while permitting their destruction through abortion in others. The inconsistency is not just legal but moral: how can the same unborn child be a victim when killed by an assailant, but a non-person when killed in the womb by consent?

Catholic Doctrine and Natural Law

This natural moral instinct—enshrined in law—finds its fullest justification in the Catholic tradition, which draws not only on revelation but on reason. The Church has always taught that from the moment of conception, the human being is to be treated as a person. As the Catechism affirms:

“From the moment of conception, the human being must be recognised as having the rights of a person—among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.”⁵

St Thomas Aquinas, in his treatment of natural law, teaches that man is directed by reason to preserve life, and that laws contrary to reason and justice are not true laws but corruptions of law (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, a. 2). To permit the deliberate killing of the innocent is to dissolve the very foundation of law and civil order.

Canon law reflects this serious moral teaching. The 1983 Code of Canon Law imposes a latae sententiae (automatic) excommunication on those who procure a completed abortion, provided they act with full knowledge and deliberate consent.⁶ This penalty is not motivated by harshness, but by the Church’s grave concern for souls and her urgent call to conversion.

Creasy’s Amendment: Innovation or Inversion?

What Stella Creasy now proposes is not legal progress but moral inversion: the redefinition of vice as virtue, of violence as care, of human destruction as a matter of human rights. Worse still, her proposed “democratic lock” would attempt to prevent future governments from undoing the damage, establishing abortion as a fixed principle of British political life.

To call abortion a human right is to reject not only Christian teaching, but the most basic philosophical truth—that rights derive from goods, and the first and most foundational good is life. A society that claims the power to eliminate the innocent under the protection of “rights” has ceased to understand justice at all.

This proposed amendment also portends legal coercion. Already in parts of Canada and Europe, midwives and doctors who refuse to participate in abortion have faced loss of licence or employment. If Britain enshrines abortion as a right, Catholic hospitals, Christian medics, and even educators may be targeted for exclusion from public life.

The Measure of a Nation

As St Teresa of Calcutta warned, “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use violence to get what they want.” To remove the last vestiges of legal protection for the unborn is to abandon the weakest members of society to the tyranny of convenience.

Catholics must not remain silent. The 1861 Act stood as a moral barrier against the commodification of life. If that wall is torn down, we are not progressing—we are regressing into a darker age, one in which might makes right and the strong dictate who has permission to live.

Let us pray that our legislators remember the God-given dignity of every human life, and reject this amendment that would make the killing of the innocent not merely legal, but a protected right.

Footnotes

¹ Stella Creasy, “Britain still treats abortion as a crime. It’s time to change the law,” The Guardian, 12 May 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/12/britain-abortion-right-decriminalisation-law
² Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), Vol. I, Ch. 1.
³ UK Parliament, House of Commons Debates, Hansard, 1966–67 Session, Abortion Bill Debates.
⁴ See e.g., Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), “Homicide: Charging Practice,” §4.11, and R v Adeeko [2021] EWCA Crim 712, where the death of an unborn child was included in sentencing. While the Born Alive rule still applies in some cases, aggravating factors and victim impact statements increasingly treat fetal death as equivalent loss.
⁵ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2270.
⁶ Codex Iuris Canonici (1983), canon 1397 §2.