Believing women in a legal system that distrusts them: The complicated exceptionalism of only allowing abortion “in cases of rape”

Manna Mostaghim is a researcher and PhD candidate in the Health Policy Department at the London School of Economics. Her research examines race and gender in healthcare and health infrastructure, and her doctoral research focuses on the provision of publicly subsidised IVF for women with a high BMI in the UK.

For a pregnant person subject to physical and sexual abuse, access to abortion can be a matter of safety and survival. A pregnancy can allow an abusive person to exert control and make it harder for a pregnant person to leave. But what happens when a pregnant person that is seeking an abortion is required to prove that they have experienced violence? And who gets to decide whether their circumstances justify an abortion?

In certain countries, including the US, women seeking abortion healthcare may need police endorsement of the claims of violence and a judicial judgment – a hard thing to obtain when criminal investigations and court processes are long – and a pregnancy has a time limit. But in England and Wales, women seeking abortions are not required to prove they have experienced rape or domestic abuse. Under the Abortion Act 1967, an abortion can generally be carried out within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy if two doctors agree, in good faith, that continuing the pregnancy would pose a greater risk to the woman’s physical or mental health, or that of her existing children, than terminating it. 

That is the legal situation. Politically, however, in England and Wales, the argument and support for abortion is being challenged and its necessity minimised. Pro-natalist policies are ascendant. Demands for gender equality positioned as hysterical, with continued claims of sexism being called hyperbolic. Time limits on abortion are being challenged; anti-abortion organisations are trying to reinvigorate conditions for what grounds an abortion would be permissible – and like in the United States, access to abortion could be severely restricted to a limited set of facts. 

Violence and Pregnancy

The relationship between pregnancy and intimate partner violence is well documented. Women in violent relationships are over six times more likely than other women to report that a pregnancy was imposed on them (13% compared with 2%). One in five women in Britain seeking abortion pills online cited abusive or controlling circumstances. Pregnancy is itself a point of heightened danger, with around 30% of domestic abuse beginning during pregnancy. Pregnancy can be used to enforce marriage or family control, Karma Nirvana’s helpline supported a record 3,079 cases in 2024 to 2025, far above the number recorded by police.

Abortions can be a life-saving procedure for a pregnant person who is subject to violence and control – in some cases even offering a way out of a dangerous situation. Even those who object to abortion do qualify their view by saying “except in cases of rape”. 

But who determines access to abortion on a limited set of facts – in England and Wales, who would become the gatekeeper for an abortion in the case of rape?    

The protection of persons subject to sexual violence within England and Wales

In 2020, a coalition of women’ s organisations argued that rape had been effectively decriminalised in England and Wales. In 2021, the Victim’s Commissioner Dame Vera Baird identified that “For victims, reporting rape is effectively a lottery and the odds are rarely in your favour. In the year to December 2021, there were 67,125 rape offences recorded – an all-time high. Yet the number of completed rape prosecutions plummeted from 5,190 in 2016-17 to just 2,409 in 2020-21. The numbers of convictions almost halved (2,689 in 2016/17 compared to 1,409 in 2020/21). Only 5% of rapes that were given an outcome by the police in the year ending December 2021 resulted in a charge”. 

In the same period covered by Dame Baird’s findings, prosecutions of persons that had procured abortion outside the legal remit were occurring at record rates in England and Wales. The National Police Chiefs’ Council also disseminated a document for Practice Advice on Child Death Investigation. This included seizing all technological equipment of a person suspected of an illegal abortion – and in the case of Nicola Parker, it resulted in a four year investigation.   

In 2021, Sarah Everard was murdered after being subjected to brutal sexual violence by a police officer who should have never been permitted to enter the police service due to a series of red flags. A man who existed within a police service where “officer perpetrated domestic abuse [is] an “epidemic”. When women tried to hold vigil for Sarah Everard, police action was disproportionately forceful and the police were later sanctioned and ordered to pay damages. But in a legal system where abortion is only legal in cases of rape, someone like the murderer Wayne Couzens could be the gatekeeper to your abortion.    

In 2026, in England and Wales, the state is debating whether rape can be perceived as a reasonable function of the state in a limited set of circumstances. As in, agents of the state can romance you, receive your consent (on deceptive grounds), impregnate you – all while spying on you and receiving a salary from your taxes. It has happened since 1968 – and although it was not sanctioned on the books, in 2026, an undercover officer conceded to the Undercover Policing Inquiry that he had a relationship he had previously denied under oath. 

How could a state that demonstrates permissiveness to sexual violence towards women then be trusted to determine whether a woman could get an abortion because of rape or violence?

A woman’s testimony of violence

In 2026, Abortion Rights condemned the comments of Robert Kenyon, Reform’s candidate in Makerfield, when he suggested that “women falsely claim rape in order to access abortion care”. A testimony to a continued insidiousness of an ugly patriarchy, a hydra-like manosphere that keeps on spawning new ugly heads, a newly emboldened and well-funded far right that wants women behind white picket fences. In this myopic and ahistorical worldview, abortion is being framed as the harm, and its necessity as a protection from harm is being forgotten. 

For a brief moment, it seemed we were beginning to believe women who reported sexual violence. Now, familiar patterns of suspicion and disbelief are resurfacing. The recent case at Cornell University, in which a student alleges she was sexually assaulted by seven men at a fraternity party, has reignited the debate. As with the #MeToo movement in 2017, women have responded by sharing their own experiences of sexual violence, of reporting abuse and of being disbelieved. 

The argument to support the alleged rapists at Cornell from prosecution has reinvigorated claims that the law cannot contain this! Courts cannot judge this! An assumption of safety is the default; harm is the outlier. If a woman does not err on the side of caution – what does she expect? But this is not a new argument, the laws claiming to protect women from harm have always instead protected the fallibility of men and interrogated the caution of women. It is literally an adage in the laws that govern us.

The stories of harm inflicted upon women are often made porous by ruthless scrutiny. 

Not all men, we are told. But what does it take to prove that it is one man? Is it a catalogue of videos and photos that depict years of non-consensual sex? Is it photos and videos of physical violence inflicted upon you for years?

What does it take to unravel that proof? You drank, you did drugs, you said yes (even once upon a time), you said yes to him and by extension his friends, you stayed, you married him, you had children with him, you’re a sex worker, you’re a bad communicator, you’re a tease, you secretly wanted it, he was kind to you, he promoted you.

The socialisation of doubt in women’s testimony of the violence inflicted, manifests itself constantly in every relationship that she has with the world. If you are a woman from an ethnically minoritised community, more doubt; if you are a habitual substance user, more doubt; if you are a sex worker, more doubt; if you are poor, more doubt; if you are less educated, more doubt – and more doubt inevitably comes with more harm.

Doubt may not only trouble the access to abortion in the future – it makes pregnancies harder now, it makes maternal mortality higher now, it makes requesting social benefits for raising children harder now.

Migrant women face additional barriers. Even when their experiences of violence are believed, they may still struggle to access the support they need. NHS charging exemptions for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, trafficking and FGM do not work in practice, driving women into debt and trapping them in abusive relationships. So they may be believed, but still endure plenty of harm in a system that is not resourced and skilled at mitigating violence against women.

Even with all this doubt, the trade for a victim for the possibility to be believed is that you will need to give up privacy. A 2020 Big Brother Watch FOI investigation of 390 rape cases across 22 police forces found that at least one in five complainants refused police requests to download their phone data, and that every case where a complainant refused was dropped. A pregnant person who would need an abortion, in the case of rape would therefore need to dispense of privacy for the possibility to access medical intervention.  

Persons will sometimes couch their support for abortion to a limited set of circumstances; abortion should be allowed in the case of rape and incest. But, if we require abortion based on proof, how can you prove it in a world that so desperately wants to disprove it?