No one was especially interested in Jolyon Maugham’s take on next week’s abortion amendments, but the Babe Ruth of the bar has waded into it all the same. The fight is on as rival amendments to decriminalise abortion battle for support ahead of next week’s free vote on a change in the law. Now the baseball bat-wielding barrister has taken to Twitter to tweet about his role in the whole thing – and has concluded that the warring female politicians should stop their arguing about which amendment is better, mash them together and, er, just shut up. Charming!
Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill which aims to decriminalise abortion at any stage by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy. Meanwhile Stella Creasy’s has taken a different position, tabling a rival amendment which would make accessing an abortion a human right – which has sparked concern among some of the UK’s biggest abortion care providers who claim it would effectively tear apart the 1967 Abortion Act. Good heavens…
For his part, Maugham has blasted Antoniazzi’s stance as ‘narrow’ before launching into a tirade centring himself in the whole thing. Defending Creasy’s view, the kimono-cladded KC first revealed that ‘disagreements’ between Antoniazzi, Creasy and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) have been going on for quite some time. Slamming the briefing document provided by BPAS on Creasy’s rather broad amendment – which would also decriminalise abortions by partners and healthcare professionals – Maugham claimed it made ‘seriously bad legal points’, adding:
What really horrified me was BPAS’s threat to take the fight public. I drafted some responses to that briefing document and suggested [Creasey] send them to BPAS inviting them to desist from a public attack, saying that if they did she would need to respond. I also reached out to the barrister who I guessed (correctly) had given the advice to BPAS.
The barrister and I agreed that a discussion privately would make sense rather than a public fight. No one except Farage would gain from BPAS launching a public attack. And I came away from our discussion and email exchange cheered.
My cheer was misplaced. To my surprise, and I imagine that of its barrister, BPAS took its attack public, going after Stella Creasy’s amendment in a progressively more and more aggressive fashion with its criticism increasingly bad faith and unmoored from legal reality.
Don’t hold back! The legal mastermind added: ‘The right way forward was for the amendments to be folded together picking out the best elements of both… The right thing to do – even now – would be for Tonia/BPAS and Stella to talk.’ He went on to lament: ‘I hate that I’ve felt obliged to talk about this publicly.’ Er, pull the other one. If he had his way, his pronouns would be ‘Me/Me/Me’!
Comments