Stella Creasy’s fight for relevance
Does she represent Walthamstow or Cosmo?
It’s possible that there are other egos in parliament as big as Labour MP Stella Creasy’s. It’s unlikely, though, that anyone can match her combination of relentless self-promotion and extraordinary political incompetence. Few have achieved such blanket publicity for themselves while accomplishing so little, and this week, Creasy’s chosen arena of legislative failure was abortion reform.
But wait, you might be thinking: isn’t Creasy pro-choice, and wasn’t there a drastic move towards liberalisation of abortion law this week? To which the answers are, respectively, yes she is and yes there was. On Tuesday, MPs voted to support an amendment to the crime and policing bill which will mean a woman cannot be investigated or prosecuted for ending her own pregnancy, at any point.
Though it will remain a criminal offence for a doctor to perform an abortion beyond the current 24-week time limit, this reform will mean the end of women being cruelly harassed through the justice system for having a “suspicious” miscarriage, or procuring their own late-term abortions in desperate circumstances. It is also, undeniably, a radical move that threatens to undermine the two main guarantees of the UK’s pro-choice consensus: the idea of medical oversight, and the idea of time limits based on “viability”. It repeals sections of the Offenses Against the Person Act 1861, decriminalising women who procure abortions.
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