does a woman ever own her own body?

and why are some 'feminists' arguing she has too much control?

trigger warnings: pregnancy, abortion, loss of a pregnancy and medical abuse. take care.

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A couple of weeks ago, I got to speak to some visiting American students about my debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl. I love talking to students, because they bring the best questions, aren’t afraid to interrogate your intent, and feel intensely. As people just learning about the deep injustices of the world, they are primed to want to change things—and this is a novel all about injustice. Inspired by the horrifying real story of Elena Milagro de Hoyos, whose body was disinterred two years after her death by a maniac who wished to live with her (and did so, with her corpse, for seven years), the novel asks when—if ever—a woman’s body belongs to her, in the eyes of society and those around her. I wrote it in 2018, and it was published first in 2022, just a couple of months after Roe vs Wade had been overturned in the States; for the paperback, I wrote an author’s note referring to this, and the terrifying backslide that women’s rights were taking globally. I had written what I thought was one of the most heinous possible stories of the abuse of a woman’s body. From the perspective of 2025, this seems wildly naive.

In February this year, Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black American nurse and mother to a seven-year-old child, began suffering from headaches. She presented to two different hospitals in her home state of Georgia, neither of which (allegedly) properly examined her, but instead sent her home with medication. The next morning, her partner called emergency services after he found her struggling to breathe; she was taken to Emory University Hospital, where she was declared braindead, with blood clots discovered in her brain. Adriana was nine weeks pregnant. A tragic story of the preventable loss of a young life.

Three months later, Adriana’s mother April told local news organisations that her daughter’s body was being kept on life support, against the family’s wishes, so that the foetus inside her could continue to gestate. This is a result of Georgia’s anti-abortion laws, which make illegal any abortions after the detection of ‘embryonic cardiac-cell activity’, which can begin as early as five weeks after your last period. As the vast majority of women will not know they are pregnant until after this point (even if they are trying to conceive), this essentially makes all abortion in the state illegal. But of course, Adriana Smith was not seeking an abortion; she was seeking medical care for what turned out to be fatal blood clots in her brain. It wasn’t her family that decided to keep her body functional for the sake of the baby; it was the state’s law, declaring that the handful of cells less than two cm in length had more of a claim to Adriana’s body than her family and herself. As ‘cardiac-cell activity’ can be detected from as early as two weeks after implantation, had Adriana died a month before, this situation might still have arisen. You might be just five weeks pregnant when you die, and your body can, according to the people who interpret this law (or rather, according to those who are terrified of the legal repercussions of not abiding by the law), be kept by the state in a dystopian undead condition, solely to be used as an incubator for a foetus that has barely begun to develop—a foetus that, if it manages to survive into a baby, will then grow up without a mother, one day to learn the traumatising fact that it was grown, for most of its gestation, inside what would otherwise have been a corpse.

Of course, the odds are stacked against this child. According to Adriana’s mother, the baby was delivered several weeks ago, on Friday June 13th, via c-section; the family named him Chance. Born at just six months gestation weighing less than two pounds, he is considered ‘extremely premature’ and will likely spend months in the neonatal intensive care unit. The day after Adriana’s baby was delivered, according to the family, she was taken off life support. Despite the fact that Adriana did not receive the correct medical care when it might have saved her life, her family is now on the receiving end of enormous medical bills as well as all of this trauma; you can donate to their GoFundMe here.

This story should terrify every woman, and everyone who gives a shit about women. What we are seeing is a chilling precedent being set: in states with incredibly regressive anti-abortion laws, if you are discovered to be pregnant, then your body essentially ceases to be yours. If you belong to a marginalised group, one of those systemically failed at higher rates during pregnancy—as is the case for Black women in America—the state might give more of a shit about your health when you are brain dead and gestating a baby than it did when you were alive. And your family might have no say in the matter. From the Atlantic:

“I’m not saying we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy,” [Adriana’s mother] told the local news station. “What I’m saying is we should have had a choice.”

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As Jessica Valenti reminds us over and over again at the brilliant Abortion, Every Day, such regressive anti-abortion laws are not created thanks to the will of the American public; she cites Axios/Ipsos poll results which show that 81% of Americans think abortion ‘should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government’. This includes 65% of Republic voters. According to Valenti, it is a fringe element in right-wing US politics that is aggressively rolling back women’s rights to abortion, not the opinion of the masses.

What happens in America—and especially what their political fringe elements manage to achieve—is of grave importance to us in the UK, as we are a country in many ways pathetically aligned to our much stronger neighbour. As I was reminded by American friends a couple of weeks ago, despite the political events of the last decade, the UK remains much more left wing than the States, systemically speaking, even if that situation seems incredibly fragile. It’s no surprise, then, that the right wing in this country looks to America to see how its strategies have worked and which haven’t, and when the transatlantic Overton window has been shifted sufficiently rightwards by the States, they begin their own assault—funded, in part, by those same American groups.

The right is on the rise in the UK in various terrifying ways, thanks in part to the divisive and anti-progressive right wing Reform party, led by human slug Nigel Farage. Anyone paying attention might have noticed his comments on abortion, when he said that it is ‘utterly ludicrous’ that we allow abortion up to 24 weeks in this country:

And yet, if a child is born prematurely at 22 weeks, your local hospital will move heaven and earth and probably succeed in that child surviving and going on and living a normal life.

So I believe there is an inconsistency in the law. I believe it is totally out of date.

Farage is nothing if not a canny manipulator of the media; this is a clear signalling of intent from a man who is determined to have an outsize influence on the political movements of this country. It is also a clear attempt to ‘common-sensify’ an incredibly difficult topic—that is, to frame it as a much more simple discussion than it is, and to paint a complex topic in a way that people would find difficult to disagree with without thinking about it more deeply. People don’t like to think deeply if they don’t have to, especially not in the current landscape, where we are forced to consider insurmountable global problems on a minute-by-minute basis, far outstripping our natural capacity for problem-solving. It is so easy to say: yes, that seems like common sense. Why can you have an abortion at a stage later than one at which we would try to save a premature baby?

I’m not going to go into why 24 weeks is the law in this country; you can find that better analysed elsewhere. What is notable, for me, is that Farage frames the point around the efforts of the hospital rather than the success; whether or not they manage to save that child is a secondary point. What he’s (very subtly) building his argument around is not whether or not a child can survive at that stage of gestation; it’s whether or not a hospital would try to save it.

This is, of course, a moveable feast. As we have seen in the US, in the case of Adriana Smith, is that what the medical profession does and will try to do is dictated by the law, especially when it comes to issues of pregnancy and birth. The law, strictly considered, is unconcerned with what is best for a woman, nor what she or her family might want, as the Adriana Smith case shows. But there was a case much closer to home that proves the point: the preventable death, in 2012 in Ireland, of 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar. At 17 weeks pregnant, Savita presented to a Galway hospital with back pain and was sent away; after she returned later that day, she was examined and was found to be suffering an extended miscarriage, with the gestational sac protruding from her cervix. That night her waters broke, but nothing else moved on. Over the next three days, as her health deteriorated, Savita’s request for a medical termination to finalise the miscarriage was denied because of the presence of a foetal heartbeat; Ireland’s abortion laws, at the time, did not allow abortion if a heartbeat could be detected, the constitution’s Eighth Amendment giving ‘equal’ right to life to both a mother and the foetus inside her. Savita developed septicaemia and died of cardiac arrest seven days after she had arrived at the hospital asking for help. Her death was entirely due to the withholding of a necessary abortion.

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The backlash from Savita’s death, led by feminist groups in Ireland, led to a referendum and the eventual repeal of the Eighth Amendment, legalising abortion in Ireland up to 12 weeks without restriction. Thereafter, the law allows abortion where two doctors state that the foetus is not likely to survive a month after birth, or where two doctors state that there is ‘serious risk to the life or of serious harm to the health of a pregnant woman’; in an emergency situation, this is lowered to just one doctor. What’s notable about this is that there is no legal gestational limit on abortion, after 12 weeks, where there is a fatal foetal abnormality or a risk to the mother’s life or health.

In Great Britain, the laws around abortion are somewhat different. The 1967 Abortion Act did not broadly make termination of a pregnancy legal, but permitted abortions to be undertaken by a medical practitioner within the first 28 weeks of pregnancy, if two medical practitioners are of the good faith opinion:

(a) that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-eighth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family; or

(b) that the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman; or

(c) that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(d) that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.

In 1990, this was amended to a limit of 24 weeks rather than 28. It did not allow for abortion on demand, and still does not. The reason that abortions are widely available up to 24 weeks in Great Britain is solely down to a very liberal application of this law, around the mental health point specifically; we generally understand that any continuation of an unwanted pregnancy will pose a risk to the mental health of the mother, and so on that ground most people can access abortion up to 24 weeks.

The termination of a pregnancy remains illegal here, outwith these circumstances. Due to the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, in fact, a woman terminating her own pregnancy outside the above circumstances can be subject to life in prison (this act was repealed in Northern Ireland in 2020, so does not apply there). This law was put in place 57 years before the first women in Britain were allowed to vote. During covid lockdowns, legislation was brought in to allow women to terminate their pregnancies using prescribed abortion pills at home, after a phone or video consultation with a doctor, up to ten weeks. Abortion providers considered this a revolution in access to abortion, eliminating the need for women to travel; while abortion pills are how the vast majority of abortions occur in the UK, prior to this legislation, women were required to take the first pill at a clinic.

In the last few years, there has been an alarming rise in women being prosecuted in the wake of their pregnancy having ended. Currently, any woman seeking to end her pregnancy without the approval of two doctors can be criminalised, and any woman using abortion pills to end her pregnancy after 24 weeks can be criminalised—even in the case of error. And this potential for criminalisation is leading to surveillance of women by the law. According to a cross-party briefing put forward by a collection of medical groups, ‘Abortion providers have reported that in recent years they have received c.50 requests for women’s medical records from the police in relation to suspected abortion offences’; other outlets report than more than 100 women have been investigated when their pregnancies ended, including ones who suffered miscarriage and stillbirth. As Zoe Williams writes in the Guardian, the number of women being prosecuted is on the increase:

Between 1861 and November 2022, three women in Great Britain were convicted of an illegal abortion... One was a refugee, in 2012, who was given a community order. The other two, in 2012 and 2015, were given jail sentences. Since December 2022, six women have been charged. They are awaiting trial.

In England and Wales, 99% of abortions happen before 20 weeks. 88% happen before 10 weeks, in fact. Only 0.1% of abortions occur after 24 weeks; in 2022, this accounted for 260 such abortions. We are talking a statistically tiny amount of terminations. As discussed above, liberal application of abortion law means that most women can access abortion care up to the 24th week of their pregnancy; any woman trying to procure abortion after this point, then has to be considered vulnerable, and in crisis. Perhaps she did not know she was pregnant; perhaps she is a victim of abuse, trying to end a pregnancy that will further that abuse and invite it upon a child; perhaps she is in a state of mental or physical distress—in any of these situations, what a woman needs is medical care and social support, not arrest. A woman does not knowingly carry a pregnancy for six months—going through all the intense and often difficult physical and mental challenges of pregnancy—when she has the option to terminate, only to turn around in the final stages of that pregnancy and decide that actually she can’t be bothered, putting her own life at risk by administering a late term abortion without medical care simply because she doesn’t want the baby any more. It is always a crisis situation. This is why new legislation seeks to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales, to bring us in line with Northern Ireland (though still not in line with Ireland) and to ensure that pregnant women in distress in the late stages of their pregnancy will see a hospital, not a jail. The laws around abortion do not change; medical providers still cannot provide abortions after 24 weeks except in medically necessary situations. All that has changed is that desperate women will not face criminalisation, and women who have suffered devastating loss will hopefully not be then subjected to traumatising investigation. The fact that MPs voted for this legislation last month is, on the face of it, a positive step for women. However, the manner in which this is being pushed into law is incredibly problematic, which we will come back to.

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There are many divisions in the modern feminist movement (as there have always been), but I had really (and perhaps stupidly) believed that abortion rights were one thing we could all agree on. The very foundations of feminism are that a woman’s body is her own, and she should have control over what happens to it—in the face of a state and a culture that continually tries to exert control over her precisely because she is a woman. Imagine my surprise, then, when some of the most prominent ‘gender-critical’ feminists came strongly out against the decriminalisation of abortion via the legislation discussed above.

It does not take a great mind to see the danger of some of the language these women used; ‘Late-term abortions kill babies. Viable babies’, said one, in a long thread full of reactionary rhetoric. Of course, early-term abortions also terminate viable pregnancies. The casual use of the term ‘babies’ is very telling; when does a foetus become a baby? This is not terminology around which you can create law. If we are going to say that abortions should not be allowed in the presence of a viable foetus, all of a sudden we are making abortion illegal in the vast majority of cases. We are creating situations whereby women’s lifeless bodies are kept going by machines for months, because the foetuses within them are ‘viable’. This is wildly dangerous language, especially in the context of now, and any feminist knows this.

More shocking to me was the assertion that ‘the law against late-term abortions acts as a deterrent against mothers killing their babies’ (of course, it is not and has never been legal for a mother to kill her baby, as murder is illegal, and this decriminalisation has literally no effect on that) and:

Babies at late term have unambiguous interests of their own. They are not just narcissistic extensions of mother. They are not parasites or invaders. They are human beings. They are dependent human beings and is weird to see feminists who talk about value of care and dependence become psychopathically detached about the value of the life of a dependent, viable baby because the mother doesn't want it.

Another, in the Times, blankly claimed that ‘now a woman could have an abortion the day before her due date for any reason she fancied’. As well as being nakedly untrue, this is some of the most misogynist messaging I have ever seen coming from self-proclaimed feminists. It is also incorrect; the law as proposed does not effect the manner by which a person might gain a late-term abortion, which still has to be approved by two doctors and still has to be medically necessary. You have to suspend reality to believe that perfectly well women are going through entire gestations only to end completely viable pregnancies in self-harming, potential lethal, non-medically assisted ways at the end because they ‘don’t want [them]’. You have to be wildly misogynist to believe that the the only thing that stops most women from killing a healthy full-term baby they’ve grown in their own body is the law—because the statistics show that this almost never occurs.

But of course, the point of this sort of messaging is to implant in the public consciousness the idea that women who seek late-term abortions are, in fact, just frivolous, narcissistic bitches who don’t want their babies any more—that any woman who seeks an abortion is doing so for selfish reasons. It is intended to suggest that there should be much, much more control over who gets to terminate their pregnancy, because it is far too liberal as things stand. That this is in direct opposition to reality matters not; the point is to mount arguments against progressive access to abortion, even when the current situation is much less progressive than our immediate neighbours. When feminists say that ‘gender-critical’ women are doing the job of the far-right for them, this is exactly what they mean.

In the UK, the situation we are currently in is this: our politics are sliding rightwards and have been for a decade and more. Mothers in this country are already hung out to dry in comparison to many countries; we have the third lowest maternity pay in Europe, insanely high childcare fees, and mothers of disabled children are going through hell trying to get the EHCPs that might ensure state provision for their kids in education and health. Maternal care is not equal: Black women are 3.7 times more likely to die during or in the first year after pregnancy than white women. The NHS is long-underfunded and being dismantled by stealth. There are forces at work in British politics who look at the rollback of abortion access in the States and wish to implement that here. Some of these people do so on supposedly Christian grounds, some on political, some on personal; some of these people have been mainstreamed through their opposition to trans inclusion within women’s spaces, and have been platformed alongside ‘gender-critical’ ‘feminists’ on that token. Alliances have been formed where they might not have been, entirely to oppose trans inclusion, and now those voices are turning on abortion access. The regression is in full effect.

And all this comes at a time when women are suffering in ways that it is hard to fathom. Iranian women, so recently lauded by white western feminists for their protests, are now considered fair game for military violence and bombed at the behest of Western interests; in the last twenty months, Palestinian women have been murdered and starved in the tens of thousands, now killed by Israeli guns as they try to get food to feed their children—all considered tolerable, or even desirable, by major western states. This is where we currently are: babies bombed in hospitals. Women pregnant against their will, criminalised for trying to do something about it. Mothers starving and murdered. Black women’s bodies used as incubators for pregnancies barely begun. How can a rational person say, as one of the above-mentioned ‘gender-critical’ commenters wrote, that the concept of ‘bodily autonomy’ has got ‘madly out of control’? To encourage the further policing of women and women’s bodies in a global landscape of anti-woman legislation and the widespread loss of a woman’s right to her own body is not just idiotic, it is diabolical.

But there are, in fact, issues with how this decriminalisation is being brought about. This positive piece of legislation is part of a larger bill, the Crime and Policing Bill, and occurs amidst a deluge of genuinely terrifying measures that threaten the right to protest and the right to privacy from the state. As the brilliant

Shanice McBean

outlines in her breakdown of the bill, it criminalises anyone concealing their identity at a protest, and the climbing of memorials, as well as expanding police powers so they can search homes with a warrant, access all driving license records to put them through facial recognition processes and deport people with valid leave to remain. These all threaten the civil liberties of women, in serious ways, and this is legislation put forward by an ostensibly centre-left government. In fact, the bundling of fragments of legislation together to push through the most disagreeable elements is a tactic of this Labour government specifically; in the bill that proposed to proscribe the nonviolent direct action group Palestine Action (which was voted for by a huge majority in parliament this week, and became law at midnight on Friday), the government also named two other groups who have next to nothing in common. As the Guardian reported:

The order seeks to ban three groups – the others being Maniacs Murder Cult, which has been accused by the US of “planning and soliciting a mass casualty attack” in New York, and the Russian Imperial Movement, which Washington says has “provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe.

This bill succeeded. It is now as illegal to publicly support Palestine Action as it is to publicly support Al-Qaeda. This is a clear and underhand method to shut down civil disobedience by both rhetorically and legally equating it with the efforts of would-be mass murderers. The bundling of the decriminalisation bill works the opposite way; support for the decriminalisation of women is intended to push through legislation that will otherwise harm women's rights. The assault on the lives of women is coming from the right, the centre-left and the faux-feminist centre all at the same time, and the expansion of the policing of our bodies and lives comes not just from anti-trans campaigning but from the importing of American political positions and directly from our government as well. We need to be more rigorous, more thoughtful and more organised than ever before. As Shanice says at the end of her breakdown of the aforementioned bill: there's a lot to do—and having apparent feminists arguing against female bodily autonomy is setting us back before we've even begun.

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You can donate to Reviving Gaza, a Gazan-led mutual aid group, here. You can donate to the Abortion Support Network, which helps and funds those who need access to safe abortions, here.