Change for terminations using drug to induce miscarriage is a first for UK and has been welcomed by pro-choice campaigners

Scotland has become the first part of the UK to allow women to take the abortion pill in their own homes.

Announcing the decision to make the drug misoprostol available for home administration, the Scottish government’s public health minister, Aileen Campbell, said: “Abortion can be an emotive subject. However, I am proud this government is working hard to ensure women are always able to access clinically safe services.

“Scotland is now the only part of the UK to offer women the opportunity to take misoprostol at home when this is clinically appropriate, a decision that allows women to be in control of their treatment and as comfortable as possible during this procedure.”

Quick guide Access to abortion across the UK Show Hide How does access to abortion vary across the UK? The 1967 Abortion Act legalised terminations in England, Wales and Scotland. It permits abortion for non-medical reasons up to 24 weeks of pregnancy and with the permission of two doctors. Abortion law was devolved to Holyrood as part of the Scotland Act 2016. The SNP has reaffirmed its commitment to ​current ​legal protections and to maintaining time limits in line with the rest of the UK. The 1967 ​​act does not extend to Northern Ireland. Abortion is legal in Northern Ireland only when the pregnancy poses a direct threat to the mother’s life. ​​An ​​amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy to allow Northern Irish women access to NHS-funded abortions in England was passed by Westminster in 2017. The Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, confirmed that regulations allowing Scottish health boards to provide abortion services to women from Northern Ireland would come into force at the beginning of November of that year. In July 2019, the UK parliament in Westminster voted to harmonise the laws on abortion and same-sex marriage across the whole of the UK if the Northern Ireland Assembly had not been restored by 21 October. On 3 October 2019, the high court in Belfast ruled that Northern Ireland’s strict abortion law breaches the UK’s human rights commitments.

Across Scotland, England and Wales, most abortions take place before 12 weeks with the use of drugs to induce miscarriage. These medical abortions accounted for 82.9% of terminations performed in Scotland in 2016.

Under current legislation, a woman must take the pills – issued with the consent of two doctors – inside a hospital or licensed clinic. The Scottish government’s revision of the licensing of misoprostol will allow women to collect the pills and return home before taking them.

Jillian Merchant, the vice-chair of campaign group Abortion Rights UK, described the decision as “a progressive move and one which is in line with modern medicine”.

She said: “This will remove the current rigmarole of a woman requiring to attend the hospital to be provided with the first pill and then sent home. Only to require to go back to the hospital to be administered the second pill and then sent back home again. It will end the horrendous experience of abortions commencing on public transport due to outdated legislation, which takes no account of medical advances or the reality of women’s lives.”

Merchant added: “This flexibility will benefit women who struggle to access services for a range of reasons such as domestic abuse, work and childcare arrangements. It will also be of benefit to rural women who struggle geographically and financially to access licensed clinics.”

The change will bring Scotland in line with the US, France and Sweden.

But John Deighan, the chief executive of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) Scotland, said the move could mark “a return to the days of back street abortions with no medical oversight and dreadful threats to women’s health”.

Deighan said: “The reality is that this will have many vulnerable women who may be desperate about the situation they are in, pushed towards what is seen as the easy option of being handed some drugs and sent home to stop being a problem for society.”

Last December, following the devolution of abortion law under the Scotland Act 2016, a report by a coalition of women’s rights organisations called on the Scottish government to scrap the legal requirement for two doctors to approve a termination, effectively decriminalising the procedure, and consider regulating abortion drugs for use by women in their own homes.

The report also countered the assumption that Scottish social attitudes, influenced by strong religious traditions, were more anti-choice than elsewhere in the UK by quoting polling carried out in 2016 that found 75% of Scots supported a woman’s right to choose.

NHS Scotland faced criticism earlier this year for its failure to provide late-stage abortions, after figures released in June showed that 180 women travelled to England for an abortion last year, nearly half of whom were at least 20 weeks pregnant. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service said this highlighted the difficulty in obtaining late-stage terminations for women north of the border.