All five Labour leadership candidates united tonight behind a vow to “defend and extend” abortion rights.
Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy backed the list of pledges that including committing to decriminalise abortion.
Abortion reforms in 1967 say that, legally, the choice must be made by two doctors.
The pledges, circulated by Labour members and the MP Stella Creasy, also committed to oppose any bid to shorten the 24-week time limit, back free morning after pills for under-16s, support anti-protest ‘buffer zones’ outside clinics and make misogyny a hate crime.
Rebecca Long-Bailey also signed the pledges, a day after comments she made about abortion sparked a row.
In a Q&A last month with Catholic priests in Salford, she said she disagreed with allowing abortions beyond 24 weeks on severely disabled unborn children.
(Image: PA)
She wrote: “It is currently legal to terminate a pregnancy up to full-term on the grounds of disability while the upper limit is 24 weeks if there is no disability. I personally do not agree with this position and agree with the words of the Disability Rights Commission that “the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally”.”
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service said only 289 terminations, 0.1% of the total, took place after 24 weeks’ term in 2018.
They included children who would die soon after birth or need “constant medical intervention and may live in pain”.
A spokesman for Ms Long-Bailey stressed the comments were only her personal view, and she had not been proposing any change to the law.
She had also told priests Labour backed decriminalising abortion and did not plan to change time limits.
Ms Long-Bailey tweeted there had been “grubby attempts over the last 24 hours to deliberately misrepresent my position.”
Writing for Mirror.co.uk tonight, Jess Phillips – who had an abortion – warned: “There can be no going back, not even an inch.”
(Image: Daily Record)
Ms Phillips did not refer to Ms Long-Bailey. She said far-right “populists” and some Tories were trying to take reproductive rights backward.
The MP added: “Let’s be clear – backwards equals darkness; with women’s rights crushed, women’s lives endangered or worse still ended, by unsafe unlicensed abortions.”
Labour’s leadership candidates began drawing battle lines today as they prepare to face members for their first hustings tomorrow in Liverpool.
Rebecca Long-Bailey and Emily Thornberry both kick-start their campaigns tonight to win over the 500,000-plus membership – as Monday is the cutoff to join the party.
Corbyn allies’ favourite Ms Long-Bailey – who a poll put just ahead of rival Keir Starmer – was due to tell an audience in Manchester that she wants to end the “gentlemen’s club of politics”.
And in an opinion piece for The Guardian, she said Labour should have “stirred up a movement for real change” after the Brexit vote instead of “winning procedural games in parliament.”
Labour has never had a female leader – and Sir Keir is the only man on the ticket. He was also a key figure in Labour’s parliamentary tactics over Brexit.
Meanwhile bookies’ outsider Emily Thornberry was due to launch her campaign in her home town of Guildford, where she grew up on the Bellfields Estate.
Interviewed by JOE.co.uk, Ms Long-Bailey hinted she had smoked cannabis – saying “ooo!” and that she had gone to Amsterdam.
She also revealed her her mum “burst into tears” when the exit poll dropped last month and said: “That’s it. That’s everyone’s hope gone.”
Ms Long-Bailey said: “It wasn’t what we believed in that was wrong. We didn’t convince our voters that what we believed in was going to make their lives better.”
