Offences Against the Person Act 1861

Um, we then had a comment from someone, which was really interesting, and I really wanna share it with everyone.

Um, she said: "When you're mentioning the laws, especially the Offences Against the Person Act, I lived in Ireland around that time, around 2016, and that was mentioned a lot in the Repeal the Eighth Amendment abortion rights campaign and decriminalizing abortion in the occupied six counties campaigns.

Because it was Offences Against the Person Act, which was a legalization used to criminalize abortion in Britain and six counties, and then was turned into the eighth amendment of the Irish Constitution in the South.

It kind of reminded me of how much of our colonization was linked and how decolonization and collective liberation is linked.

It is ultimately about policing bodies and othering people, and policing bodies under a White Christian European Victorian ideal.

And, you know, scientifically and medically, there's not an awful lot to choose between them, but the access to those methods and the way in which they're delivered and the timings in which they're done and, uh, the processes you go through, the hoops you jump through is really shaped by a country's laws and legal framework.

Um, abortion is really treated differently from almost all other kinds of healthcare, um, and has a really, um, strict legal framework, and in the UK is, uh, a very complicated legal framework in that Scottish law is different from the rest of the UK's law, and the rest of the UK, um, has a law that's a Victorian-era law from 1886 called the Offences Against the Person Act, and that prohibits abortion in all circumstances.

And the punishment for the crime of abortion for either a woman accessing abortion or a provider is, um, up to life imprisonment and hard labor.

Um, and the reason I'm still at large, I'm not in prison, um, for despite providing abortion care, is that in 1967, we then had the Abortion Act, um, and that, um, it prevent-- uh, gives you exception to prosecution from that earlier piece of law as long as you provide the abortion under a series of strict criteria.

And our mission was to bring abortion out of the shadows and to find a vocabulary to talk about it and to talk with politicians saying, "The law that makes abortion a criminal offense needs to change."

The law that made abortion illegal in Australia was created in 1863, and it was called the Offences Against the Persons Act, and it made it a crime to induce an abortion whether or not the woman was pregnant.

This was an act that was passed largely to protect women from interference with the womb in the pre-antibiotic era when women died a lot.

That act was then adopted by Victoria and included in the Crimes Act, and the penalty was fifteen years' jail for anyone who procured an abortion.

Back in England, they were starting to reform their Buggery Act as well.

And they changed it to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

And this is maybe TMI, but they changed the way that it was defined and what the criminalisation actually was.

Because before...