Dr Peter Moore: Protecting life or undermining women's rights?

In a recent case a woman was sent to prison for taking abortion pills when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant.
Was this a reasonable punishment for someone who was responsible for the death of a baby who may have survived or was it an attempt to undermine a woman’s right to choose?
The whole area is fraught with legal and ethical problems, but it is helpful to understand how we got here.
The Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, as well as clarifying the law on abortion, also stated that any pregnancy lost before 28 weeks was a miscarriage, after 28 weeks was a stillbirth.
This meant that any baby born after 28 weeks gestation who did not survive would need a death certificate. The logic at the time was that no baby born before 28 weeks could possibly survive. This was true in 1929.
When the 1967 Abortion Act was passed there was no time limit in the Act but 28 weeks was assumed to be the cut-off point as the baby would then need to be registered and a death certificate issued. As medicine improved, in 1992 the Still-Birth (Definition) Act reduced the time to 24 weeks gestation meaning that the abortion cut off was also set at 24 weeks.
Abortion has become easier. In the past women were admitted to hospital and had to go to the operation theatre. Now, if the pregnancy is less than ten weeks, they can take mifepristone and misoprostol and safely end the pregnancy. During the pandemic it was agreed that women could be prescribed these drugs over the phone after a consultation. This system worked well and has now been continued.
Sadly, in this case the woman lied to the doctors about the length of her pregnancy and was send the medication in good faith. The doctors believed that she was less than ten weeks. By lying she not only risked delivering a live baby but put herself at risk. Clearly, she was distressed but the court had to decide whether her behaviour was reasonable.
The law cannot predict every possibility, and no one had foreseen the possibility that a woman would lie. She was convicted under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. There have been arguments that we should not be using such an archaic act but other sections of this Act are used every day for GBH and ABH. The person alleged to have assaulted people at the private school Blundell’s is charged under Section 18 of the same Act, 'Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent'. What is unusual is using the sections of the Act which ban abortions.
Reading copies of the British Medical Journal from Victorian times, there was considerable debate about how to prove whether a baby was a genuine stillbirth or whether it had been murdered after birth. Could a post-mortem show whether the child ever took a breath? In the days when abortion was illegal, there was no support for single parents and having an illegitimate child was shocking one tragic option for an impoverished working-class girl would be to suffocate the baby at birth and claim it was a stillbirth.
I am sure that even the strongest advocates of a woman’s right to choose do not believe in infanticide. Abortion services are now easily accessible and only one per cent of abortions are carried out after 20 weeks. I fully support a woman’s right to have an abortion but do not want to see abortions so late that there is a risk of delivering a healthy premature baby.
Of course, there are strong arguments from both sides. Some people with strong religious convictions argue that life starts at conception and so every abortion is wrong. Others believe that abortion should be legal at any stage of a pregnancy, even when the baby could live. For the rest of us this is a very difficult area.