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.
Not radical enough for Creasy, however. The problem is that there were two proposed amendments under discussion. The one that was ultimately passed came from Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi. The other one was Creasy’s, which would have removed criminal penalties for medical professionals as well as women, and established abortion access as a human right. Even the pro-choice campaign and abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas) thought that would be going a bit far: Bpas publicly opposed the Creasy amendment, while supporting the Antoniazzi one.
As far as Creasy was concerned, this was nothing short of a betrayal — not of her personally (God forbid), but of “progressive values” as a whole. After the vote, she wrote a column for The Guardian, in which she accused opponents of her amendment of urging “caution or even capitulation” in the face of the advancing Trumpian Right — “as if we can stop the public being dragged to the extremes if we speak in hushed tones or water down our ambitions for social justice.”
Most people would give their head a wobble at the point they found themselves implying Bpas (Bpas!) were quislings of the pro-life movement. Not Creasy, though. As far as Creasy is concerned, the UK is mere inches from being absorbed into the cultural battles of America, and only she can save us. “In the coming months and years, attacks on progressive values will intensify,” she pronounced, grandly. “As we face them, let this missed opportunity to reform our abortion legislation… remind us all that half measures are not what we are in politics to take.”
Such rhetoric is not just histrionic: it’s recklessly self-perpetuating. Britain is not America, in many things but particularly when it comes to abortion. In the US, abortion has been a highly politicised, highly partisan issue since the Seventies, driven in large part by the electoral clout of the evangelical megachurches. In the UK, abortion has historically had broad support, both across the benches and throughout the public. There are no votes in reopening the choice question.
“Britain is not America, in many things but particularly when it comes to abortion.”
There are, however, a lot of risks. “Opening the Pandora’s box of abortion reform is something no one should do without the confidence that they are able to manage the resulting chaos. Moves to decriminalise abortion, in response to the continued prosecution of women for having one, could unintentionally enable the restriction of access under a future regressive government.” Who wrote that? Ah yes — Stella Creasy, five weeks ago.
That note of caution was merely the entrée to Creasy’s embrace of maximal radicalism. For Creasy, anything that matters, matters because she can put herself at the heart of it. She attempted to bring her three-month-old baby into the chamber and framed it as maternity discrimination when she was refused (even though she could have appointed a proxy). She campaigned against online abuse by highlighting the fact that she, personally, had been targeted.
It’s depressing to compare Creasy now with Creasy over 14 years ago, when she had just entered parliament and The Spectator awarded her its Campaigner of the Year award for her work on payday loans. Since then, she has become ever more like a celebrity, and ever less like an MP. Her constituents broadly consider her diligent and hard-working, but her attentions are clearly divided between them and publicity. Creasy is the female politician most likely to answer a women’s magazine’s press request: her constituency is Walthamstow, but she was also representing Cosmopolitan, which recruited her to its decriminalisation campaign.
You can get a sense of how politically isolated she is from the fact that her abortion amendment was drafted, not with support from other parliamentarians or from reproductive rights campaigners, but from the Good Law Project and Jolyon Maugham. Maugham’s expertise is tax law; the Good Law Project’s most notable achievement has been failing to win almost every case it put its name to. Why Creasy would choose such a partner for the delicate issue of abortion law reform is hard to fathom, unless you consider Maugham’s track record of attention-seeking to be an asset.
Because Creasy’s amendment did get attention, much of it very negative. Outside Parliament, the anti-abortion group Centre for Bioethical Reform UK (CBR UK) erected giant posters showing a graphic image of an aborted foetus with the slogan: “Your MP is working very hard… to make this a human right.” Creasy, ever on brand, shared a photo of the placards on X with the caption: “This isn’t debate it’s incitement.” (Incitement to what was unspecified.) In fact, I suspect that CBR UK had given her exactly what she wanted: a chance to play the brave liberal, beleaguered by the forces of reaction.
The most unfortunate thing about Creasy’s amendment is not that it’s given everyone a reason to talk more about Stella Creasy. It’s that it flattened the debate about abortion reform into a choice between “extreme” and “even more extreme”. MPs went with the better option, but at the expense of having a full discussion about the overall principle (a principle that was never even mentioned in the Labour manifesto). That cannot be the right way to address matters of the gravest ethical concern.
Protecting vulnerable women from prosecution is a worthy aim, but the Antoniazzi reform is wide open to unintended consequences. Decriminalising women, but not medics, creates a perverse incentive for scared women unsure about their date of conception to self-administer their abortion. That will lead, inevitably, to a small number of women going through the trauma of an induced late miscarriage on their own. Some will suffer complications. It will only take one horrifying headline for the public to get twitchy, and Nigel Farage is already making noises about reducing the time limit.
Because for all Creasy’s posturing about being the only one to truly recognise the threat from the populist Right, her actions suggest above all an unseriousness. Anyone who truly feared the rise of the reactionaries would see the UK’s abortion settlement as something too precious to be gambled with. Any student of reproductive rights in America would know that the more entangled organisations like Planned Parenthood became in the culture wars, the more inevitable their defeat was. Anyone who genuinely believed Farage could be the next prime minister would refuse to hand him an easy win.
Creasy is treating abortion rights as collateral in her own personal war for relevance. By putting them at stake, she can anoint herself as their champion, guaranteeing her own importance and righteousness. The backlash she is inciting carries a high cost for women who need abortion, but little cost to Creasy: if a future Reform government embarks on a clampdown, she will be able to say “I told you so” rather than own up to her own part in making abortion a frontline political issue. So long as she has the spotlight, Creasy never really loses.
