THE Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Act 2024 came into force in September, aiming to provide legislative protection from harassment for those accessing or working in abortion services by creating Safe Access Zones around clinics and hospitals.

Similar legislation which will apply in England and Wales is on the way. This Bill is a victory for the grassroots activists Back Off Scotland, who have been at the forefront of the campaign for the last four years.

Writing in the Herald, co-founder of Back Off Scotland Lucy Grieve has indicated that the group’s “next priority” is campaigning to expand Scotland’s abortion services and that they are “looking forward to working with the Scottish government over the coming months to look at ways in which we can reform Scotland’s archaic abortion law.”

There is currently a lack of clarity on what the criminal law on abortion in Scotland actually is. While historically, Scottish courts have taken a more lenient approach towards those who secure their own abortions; abortion is criminalised through a collage of legislation dating back as far as the 1600s and common law based on the court’s interpretation of custom and convention.

There is no legal right to end a pregnancy and no guarantee that individuals or clinicians would not be prosecuted for doing so.

Abortion is vital, routine healthcare and is one of the safest and most frequently accessed medical procedures used by women across the world and is directly linked to improving gender equality. Scotland’s current legal position leaves women and clinicians legally vulnerable — the door to accessing safe, legal abortions is very much open to challenge.

The Abortion Act 1967 sets out circumstances in which abortion is permitted across Scotland, England and Wales and sets out the requirement for two doctors to authorise almost all abortions, the “grounds” for abortion (including that the pregnancy has not exceeded 24 weeks and will result in negative impacts to the pregnant person or family) and for abortion to be provided in specified locations and by specified healthcare practitioners. If these conditions are not met, then abortion is a common law crime in Scotland.

And very close to home, women are indeed being prosecuted for accessing abortions in Britain. A 2023 report revealed that Police in England have been adopting alarming investigation methods in cases of unexplained pregnancy loss, such as requesting data from menstruation tracker apps and requesting mass spectrometry blood tests to screen for the presence of mifepristone or misoprostol.

There has also been a sharp rise in the number of trials and convictions. Earlier this year, charity MSI Reproductive Choices told the BBC it was aware of 60 criminal inquiries in England and Wales since 2018, compared with almost none before.

An English woman was sentenced to 28 months in prison after pleading guilty to using the abortion pill mifepristone at 32 to 34 weeks during lockdown.

Practical access to abortion in such a manner that the legal grounds are met is not entirely straightforward — in Scotland, there is only one doctor trained to perform surgical abortions beyond 20 weeks, meaning that an increasing number of women have no choice but to travel elsewhere to access potentially life-saving healthcare due to lack of provision.

Reproductive healthcare, in general, is unequal in geographic terms, with women in remote and rural Scotland among those most experiencing service poverty, with many women in the Northern Isles having to routinely travel to Aberdeen due to lack of local access to specialist maternity care.

It is easy to see a situation where abortion may well become increasingly difficult to access and increasingly criminalised.

If the Scottish government is telling women that it agrees that “our bodies, our choices” is to be taken seriously, we must consider what kind of choices are actually available and to what bodies these choices apply.

The banishment of Texas-backed anti-abortion campaigners with their prayers, judgement and placards featuring unsettling graphic design from outside the gates of hospitals and clinics is certainly welcome.

However, last week, as I watched arguably the world’s most powerful baby celebrate his imminent return to the White House, I couldn’t help but wonder if we have won the battle — but perhaps not the war.