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The reason Stella is joining us today is because the UK Parliament is set to consider decriminalising abortion in England and Wales this summer
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Two backbench Labour MPs are drawing up separate proposals to change the law which would be brought before MPs in the coming months after previous plans ran out of time before the 2024 general election
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And this has now become urgent because, well, listen to this. I genuinely believe these are issues of personal conscience
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I am pro-choice, but I think it's ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous, that we can allow abortion up to 24 weeks
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and yet if a child is born prematurely at 22 weeks, your local hospital will move to heaven and earth
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and probably succeed in that child surviving and going on and living a normal life
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So I believe there is an inconsistency in the law. I believe it's totally out of date
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But I do believe I wouldn't particularly want anyone around me to agree with that or disagree with that
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I'd leave it up to them. I think our current situation on this is irrational
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Stella Creasy, thank you for joining us. What's your response to that clip that we just heard there from Nigel Farage
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Well, I just don't think that Nigel's ever been in the room when you have your 20 week anomaly scan for a baby that you really, really want
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And the doctor turns to you and says, I'm sorry, it's bad news
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The reality is that 90 percent of abortions in this country take place before 10 weeks
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So those abortions that take place at those later gestations tend to be the most tragic cases of all
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The people who've got a fatal fetal abnormality in layman terms, Natasha, that means they've been told they're going to have a child that will probably die when it is born
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And they make a choice to have an abortion. And actually, one of my constituents wrote to me about this
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And she said, I had that that because I decided to take the pain so that my little boy didn't have to
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So when I hear Nigel Farage doing that I hear two things One I hear somebody who probably hasn done much homework to understand quite why our abortion time limits because remember abortion isn legal in this country but the time limit under which you can access abortion and not be prosecuted is what it is But also
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I hear something more sinister, which is the debate that we've seen in America that we know
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is now here on our shores, which is about demanding that women justify why they want control
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of their bodies, because frankly, it shouldn't be anybody's business. Those 3000
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late abortions that happen every single year on nobody else's business, they're obviously an
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incredibly tragic position. So when Nigel Farage does this, he's not really talking about those
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families, he's not really spoken to them. What he's doing is sending a bat signal to the Trumpian
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playbook from America about women's bodies as a part of the cultural wars and the battlefield that
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they are and saying it is our right to control what control they might have as to what happens
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to them and be damned to the consequences. Because it's a cruel, unusual form of torture to ask
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somebody to carry to term a baby they know is going to die. And a lot of people will be surprised
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to hear you say that abortion is not legal in this country and that there are calls to
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decriminalise it, because I think the common perception is that it is legal. So can you
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explain to us why it's not? Yeah, we need to be very explicit about this. What the law says
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is that you are exempted from prosecution if you follow certain conditions of access
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Now, that might sound quite technical, but actually what we've seen over the last couple of years
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is a massive rise in investigations and prosecutions under the old 19th century law
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that made having an abortion a criminal offence and indeed helping somebody to have an abortion
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a criminal offence in of itself. So this isn't a theoretical matter. We've seen very young women
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who didn't realise they were pregnant, having late-term miscarriages, finding not a counsellor at their hospital bed, but a police officer
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We've seen women go to court. We've seen some of them being jailed
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But we've also seen an increasing call for restrictions on access. So 250,000 abortions take place on average in this country every year
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None of them are legal. The women who have them are exempted from prosecution
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But the fact that that law remains means that their access to it is always a much shakier foundation than people might realise So when those people want to attack abortion rights it much easier for them to do so than people might realise So my understanding is that you now consider it that it urgent that we decriminalise abortion
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because America has sneezed and we're about to catch a cold with regard to this issue
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Let me be very clear. Decrim is not enough. But I do think we should repeal that outdated
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legislation. I do not wish to mess with the time limits. I think the way in which we provide
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abortion should be a matter of medical, not criminal regulation. But decrim is not enough
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to stop the attacks that we are seeing, because it's not just Nigel Farage. People will have heard
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the American vice president criticise free speech in our country and attack the safe access zones
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that we have around abortion clinics, the fact that you can't protest outside an abortion clinic
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I am somebody, Natasha, will always defend somebody's right to disagree with me on abortion
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I will always defend the right to prayer. But you do not have the right to pray in the face of a woman who's made a very private choice to have an abortion and basically attempt to stop her
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But J.D. Vance has attacked that. His assistants have attacked it again in the last week as well
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Decriminalisation on its own would not protect access to abortion. What I want us to do is learn from what we did in Northern Ireland
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so your listeners may not also realise that it's Northern Ireland that has the most progressive
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abortion legislation in this country. It's Northern Ireland where abortion is actually
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legal and it is protected as a human right and because it's protected as a human right that
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means that the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commissioner has taken the government to court
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when people have tried to stop access or restrict access or deny a service and more importantly
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she's won those court cases. So I think it is now time for us to equalise rights in England and Wales
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that we have. And I don't understand why my constituents in Walthamstow don't have the same rights as a woman in Belfast, not just to not be facing criminal investigations and prosecutions
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but to have that access protected as a basic human right and to have somebody whose job it is to make
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sure that happens, whoever might be in government, whoever might be in the civil service or in the
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police who doesn't agree with that right. Stella, we're talking this hour about some comments made
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by Andy Burnham about the direction of the Labour Party and him saying that Labour needs to once again become the party of working class ambition Do you understand what he means by that I am resolutely ambitious for
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everybody in this country and particularly for the communities like mine in Walthamstow. I always
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call Walthamstow God's own country. I think everybody should want to live in my community
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because I meet brilliantly talented young people in my community. You could probably cure cancer or
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invent a new technology that would save us from climate change. But because of where they live
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because of their family background, because of the lack of investment that we've seen in basic
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public services, their ability to actually realise that ambition and that talent is hampered. And I
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think we all miss out as a result. So I joined the labour movement. I fight for socialism and
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social justice, because I think we have to get the best out of each of us for the benefit of all of
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us. And when we don't see that ambition, when we write off kids because of the backgrounds they
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come from, we write ourselves out of the picture. Interesting. So you think that it's about
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reclaiming Labour's socialist roots, which presumably is at odds with the direction that
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the government is going in at the moment? Listen, I've been in the Labour movement for over 30 years
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now. I've disagreed with every Labour leadership on something. And I've also campaigned for every
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leadership because I fight for social justice. So yes, I am absolutely determined that we've got
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to tackle the fact that for too many people, there's too much month at the end of their money. But it's more than that, isn't it, Natasha? It's the fact that people write people off. It's the fact that there are politicians who want to divide us and say these are the winners, these are the losers, whether it's on the colour of your skin, your sexuality, whether your gender or indeed your social class
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It's holding us all back. That's my concern about this, is that if we allow a politics that says there should be winners and losers, we miss out on what people are capable of
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That isn't what I came into politics for. I will fight for policies that make it more possible for people to be freer
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And I include in that abortion rights, because it's freeing women up from not having control over their bodies just as much
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I want to make sure that we end poverty, which is why, yes, I want to see an end to the two child cap
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Stella Creasy, thank you so much. Labour MP for Walthamstow there saying some really important stuff, I think, particularly with regards to the abortion issue
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It's not something that I want to have to debate with you behind this microphone, to be frank
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And if you disagree with abortion, please do feel free not to have one. But don't come for my right