Stewart Jackson is a former Conservative MP and Particular Adviser, and is the Founder and Director of UK Political Perception.
Freedom of conscience is a vital precept – solely a tyrant would compel their topics to behave towards their ethical beliefs. Parliament recognises this by designating sure issues as ‘conscience’ points on which political events agree to carry free votes.
A lot of that is noble, however it additionally carries an accompanying hazard – free votes can turn out to be means by which events evade duty for making selections on points that could be uncomfortably controversial among the many voters or their MPs. The free vote might be a simple method out.
Free votes should even have limits. A problem shouldn’t mechanically be deemed a matter of conscience just because it requires ethical judgements. Virtually each situation, from taxation to immigration, requires governments to weigh up competing values, whereas some moral points are so clear-cut there’s a ethical crucial to whip – for instance, prohibiting segregation or baby pornography.
Top-of-the-line-known examples of a ‘conscience’ situation requiring a free vote is abortion. Rightly or wrongly, it has been a conference that the difficulty shouldn’t be determined upon occasion traces.
Nonetheless, it shouldn’t comply with that as a result of some selections regarding abortion, such because the discount of the time restrict in 1990 from 28 to 24 weeks (nonetheless double that of the EU median), have been designated free votes, all points regarding abortion should be so. For instance, few would see the horror of partial-birth abortion as a legit situation of conscience.
Furthermore, the place points associated to abortion affect different basic ideas, a free vote could be the path of cowardice. There may be greater than a sneaking suspicion that Conservative governments on this Parliament have been operating scared on the difficulty, buckling to the vocal abortion foyer even when it contradicts the Authorities’s proof and results in hostile results.
Take abortion clinic buffer zones. Real harassment of girls in search of an abortion is fallacious, but the Authorities’s personal overview into actions exterior abortion clinics in 2018 concluded that buffer zones had been pointless and adequate legal guidelines already existed to stop harassment. Nonetheless, when the Authorities’s Public Order Act 2023 was hijacked by pro-abortion MPs to herald buffer zones, the Authorities waved the white flag and didn’t whip on a matter that primarily involved free speech reasonably than conscience.
The result’s that the identical police who seemingly flip a blind eye to genuinely intimidating anti-semitic protests on the streets of London will quickly be required to arrest peaceable volunteers praying silently or providing sensible assist exterior abortion clinics – particularly if the abortion foyer succeeds in its present efforts to overturn the steadiness of freedoms contained within the Authorities’s draft steerage on these buffer zones.
Maybe worse was the Authorities’s determination to not whip towards an modification to its Well being and Care Act in March 2022 that made everlasting the ‘drugs by publish’ scheme. This scheme permits girls to be despatched abortion drugs with out an in-person appointment to confirm their gestation is inside the authorized restrict and that their need for an abortion isn’t the topic of coercion.
The Authorities had sturdy grounds to whip on this situation: it had already introduced the top of the scheme, which was launched throughout the pandemic, after its personal session discovered 70 per cent of respondents wished it to cease. The dangers to girls of taking abortion drugs with no correct in-person check-up are properly documented. This should have been a public well being situation however as a result of abortion was concerned, the Authorities caved in and the scheme was made everlasting underneath a free vote.
The Authorities is about to face one other such determination the place a free vote can be even much less justifiable. Diana Johnson, a Labour MP, has tabled an modification to the Legal Justice Invoice in search of to take away offences that make it unlawful for a lady to manage her personal abortion, a proposal supported by solely 16 per cent of the general public.
As Johnson’s explanatory notice to the modification states, this is able to apply to being pregnant “at any gestation”. In different phrases, girls utilizing drugs to carry out their abortion can be permitted to finish the lives of their unborn baby at any level as much as delivery, properly past the present 24-week restrict, and properly previous the purpose of viability.
Because the aforementioned ‘drugs by publish’ scheme now permits girls to accumulate abortion drugs with out an in-person appointment, that means girls can lie about their gestational age. As was the case final summer time with Carla Foster, who knowingly took drugs at 32-34 weeks gestation.
As such, this modification would de facto permit girls to carry out their very own late-term abortions. Whereas Parliament could have determined MPs’ normal view about abortion needs to be a matter of conscience, an modification that removes any authorized deterrent towards abortion as much as delivery is a special matter; if the Authorities permitted a free vote, it could be signalling it has no mounted view on the morality of abortion at full-term, one thing supported by just one per cent of the general public.
If this weren’t itself cause sufficient to whip, Diana Johnson’s modification would additionally take away the necessary deterrent that exists towards girls taking abortion drugs late in being pregnant – the Authorities’s personal overview final November discovered the complication price for drugs taken after 20 weeks gestation in a medical setting was 160 occasions larger than earlier than 10 weeks (the authorized restrict for ‘drugs by publish’).
Johnson’s modification would thus gravely endanger girls in a context the place they’ll merely pay money for drugs by dishonestly or mistakenly claiming to be earlier in being pregnant than they’re. If the Authorities as soon as once more ignores its personal overview and permits this modification to be a free vote, it could be responsible of sacrificing girls’s welfare on the altar of an excessive ideology. It will be evading duty in favour of a simple method out.