“Your boobs are huge,” my partner quipped from the hotel bed as I wiggled into my swimming costume.
I laughed it off and jiggled them in his face before taking one last swim on our holiday in the Dominican Republic, trying to quiet that voice in the back of my head, whispering, “What if you are pregnant?”
Annoyingly, the lying, anxious voices were actually right this time. I was pregnant. The day after, we landed in Montreal, Canada, and took a test to discover that my gigantic boobs were, in fact, a harbinger of a pregnancy. The shock overwhelmed me; I spun between numbness, despair, confusing tinges of happiness for a child I’d never wanted, and anticipatory grief for what was to come.
My partner and I decided to terminate the pregnancy. The only question: where should I get the abortion? I’m a UK citizen, and my partner is French Canadian. In Canada, I’d have to pay for the procedure out of pocket because my insurance did not cover it. It felt like an impossible decision: abroad, where my partner is, or home, where the free healthcare is.
Nigel Farage has said MPs should look at rolling back Britain’s abortion limit.
While I lay comatose on the sofa, my partner called clinics to get an estimate of the cost and timeline. We’d pay between £425 and £800, and appointments were available in seven days. A one-way flight home was £350.
Financially, it was a no-brainer. I also desperately wanted my mum to be around while I followed through on this difficult choice in a familiar environment. But the culture I’d be returning to terrified me. My test came back positive in the days following the sentencing of Carla Foster for procuring drugs to induce an abortion after the legal limit of 24 weeks. The vicious debate surrounding it, looming over the right to abortion with increasing intensity, emanated across the Atlantic Ocean.
Harsh words were flying from the mouths of even the most liberal people, and even though 87% of people in the UK are in favour of abortion access, I feared that my choice would incur similar wrath. The topic of abortion at home still feels taboo in most circles. In Canada, abortion is discussed openly without judgement, at least in my limited experience in Quebec.
Later, as I sat buried in blankets and snowballed panic, I redirected myself away from Twitter tirades and toward finding practical information about abortion. I wanted to focus on irrefutable facts because I knew the emotion would come later, no matter what country I did this in.
Into the wormhole I went, first discovering that although just 56% of Canadians agree abortion should be permitted whenever a woman decides she wants one, the law is in some ways more liberal than in the UK. After being legalised in 1969, abortion was decriminalised by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988 because it infringed upon women’s right to “life, liberty, and security of person.” In 1989, the Supreme Court also ruled that no father has a legal right to veto a woman’s abortion decision. Abortion is now legal in all nine months of pregnancy; however, few providers in Canada offer abortion beyond 23 weeks and six days.
And where the UK stands.
From my scrolling blanket nest, the simplicity with which Canada approached legalising abortion felt comforting, like I was in the arms of a loved one that understood the importance of protecting the right to abortion access. Everything I knew about UK abortion law felt outdated, underdeveloped, and draconian in comparison.
The UK’s abortion law is rooted in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (OAPA), which continues to criminalise abortion outside of the prescribed qualifications. The UK eked out broader allowances for abortions over decades, starting with a 1929 caveat allowing abortion to save the life of the mother and culminating in the 1967 Abortion Act, which legalised abortions with an authorised provider as an amendment to the OAPA.
Canada was also one of the first countries to introduce buffer zones; in 1995, British Colombia introduced a law that protects clinics from protestors. Similar laws for other provinces didn’t follow up until 2016, but a 50-metre buffer zone would shield me in Montreal. Despite a growing pro-life movement in the UK amid the highest number of abortions in England and Wales since records began, the government did not introduce a buffer zone law until 2023. The law still awaits enactment across the country, and debates on allowing “silent prayer” outside clinics rage on.
My anxieties over legalities and public attitudes were enough to deter me from going home. At the time, wait times for abortions were stretching anywhere from two to three weeks, and I could have had to travel away from my UK home to receive care. I also resented that I would need to meet a set of criteria to obtain an abortion by sharing my reasoning with a doctor before a second one signed off on the procedure. I had already validated my choice; I didn’t want to divulge that to a stranger in exchange for necessary healthcare.
So, I booked an appointment at a clinic in Montreal. After filling out my medical details, two nurses called me in for an assessment, which my partner was not allowed to attend to ensure he was not pressuring me. They did not ask me why I was there or demand a reason for my choice. That tiny little office, filled to the brim with diagrams and graphs, felt like a steel-encased bubble in a world full of “baby murderer” screeches. The safe space created in that room drowned out everything except the medicine.
I doubt I’m alone in choosing to have an abortion abroad instead of at home; we only know that thousands per year travel from outside the UK to receive abortion care in England, not how many choose to go abroad for an abortion elsewhere. I hope there aren’t many of us wary of undergoing an abortion in the UK, but I suspect there could be more in the future.
Abortion is healthcare.
Our law no longer reflects the world we live in; other countries are outpacing us, like France, which enshrined abortion as an indisputable right in its constitution in March. While Amnesty International recognises abortion access as a human right, the UK is taking backward steps with “traditional values” led policies around sex education and LGBTQ+ issues. I believe abortion access could be under threat soon, too.
After a few days of living under a hot shower to ease the cramps, I realised the experience would’ve demanded an equal emotional and physical toll in either country. However, my care in Canada was more straightforward; I felt protected, as though the clinic's trust in me to make my own decision without qualification maintained that steel bubble long after I left their sanctuary. The absence of protestors or “well-wishers” certainly averted undue shame spirals, too.
Yes, there were flaws – because no medical service is perfect, but I felt safer getting my abortion in a country that forthrightly enshrines abortion access in law. I could not bear enduring such a process in a country that begrudgingly accepts that right through loopholes in outdated laws that criminalise my choice.
