Emboldened anti-abortion politicians are trying to chip away at freedom of choice. Its alarming – and we must push back

As the criminal justice bill stumbles through parliament this week – beset by delays and controversies, and picking up amendments as it goes – another woman, Sophie Harvey, is on trial for an alleged illegal abortion, after taking pills to end her pregnancy when she was past the 24-week legal threshold. She was just 19 at the time. She faces a sentence of up to life in prison.

Anyone who cares about women’s rights should be alarmed not just by this trial, but by two new amendments to the bill put forward, targeting abortion in England and Wales. The first, from Caroline Ansell, a Conservative MP, aims to reduce the abortion limit to 22 weeks. The other, tabled by Liam Fox, another Conservative, would stop women’s choice over whether to abort a pregnancy where Down’s syndrome looks likely, up to birth. Currently, she can choose to do so for the entirety of her pregnancy, under ground E of the Abortion Act , which allows for termination if there is “substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”.

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Andy Evans was injecting his own clotting protein at three, and was 13 when he found it had given him HIV. Now he campaigns for fellow survivors – and the truth about the contamination scandal

• The children of the contaminated blood scandal | Today in Focus

Andy Evans was 13 when his mum took him for an unexpected drive in the countryside. “I thought: this is weird. Why are we here? We don’t do this,” he remembered. “We sat for a couple of minutes and then she turned to me with tears in her eyes. And she said: ‘Do you know what HIV is?’ And I said: ‘Well, I’ve heard of it … Isn’t it that disease that kills you?’ And she said: ‘Yep, that’s right. It’s been in the factor VIII and you’ve got it.’”

Factor VIII was the concentrated blood clotting protein he had been receiving for his haemophilia since being diagnosed as a baby. Touted as a wonder drug to stop internal bleeding, it was so easy to mix with water and inject with a syringe that Evans was able to administer it himself at home before his fourth birthday.

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Exclusive: Royal College of GPs says constitution guarantee would just pile on pressure given loss of 1,000 practices in past 10 years

Seven in 10 people want to be able to see a GP urgently within 24 hours, research by the NHS’s patient watchdog has found.

Almost three-quarters (71%) of voters in England support automatic access to a family doctor within one day of requesting an appointment for a health problem they consider cannot wait.

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Teenagers need and want good information about sex. The government’s review, and this ideological tug-of-war, is failing them

Imagine a teenage boy, alone with his phone late at night. A message pings in from a pretty stranger, or even from the hacked account of a girl he already knows. Either way, it’s crudely calculated to grab his attention. There will be pictures, tantalising promises of something even more explicit, if he’ll send nudes in response. But if he does, the brutal trap springs shut.

What follows is a demand for money, if he doesn’t want the compromising pictures plastered all over the internet for everyone at school to see. Some boys (the vast majority of so-called sextortion victims are boys ) try to pay up. The lucky ones panic and tell their parents. Tragically, a handful are known to have killed themselves rather than risk public humiliation.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Scientists point to loopholes in new legislation that have been closed under European Union regulations

New rules intended to reduce the use of antibiotics in farming in the UK have been criticised as too lax and weaker than their equivalent under EU laws.

The updated regulations come into force on Friday. They ban the routine use of antibiotics on farm animals, and specifically their use to “compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry, or poor farm management practices”.

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The number of people stuck in hospital for more than three weeks has risen 15% on pre-Covid levels

Strike action and the social care crisis have left thousands more people trapped in hospital beds with nowhere to go while other patients struggle to access the care, nullifying an increase in funding and NHS staff, it has been reported.

A damning internal review of NHS efficiency carried out last year has reportedly revealed that, despite a £20bn increase in funding since 2018 and 15% more doctors and nurses on the NHS payroll, the health service was carrying out only slightly more routine treatments than it was before Covid.

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Little wonder welfare ministers were so reluctant the publish the study they commissioned five years ago

There are plenty of reasons why welfare ministers were reluctant to publish the study they commissioned into unpaid carers’ experiences of carer’s allowance five years ago, and which has finally emerged under duress .

In 2019 they had undoubtedly been chastened by criticism from MPs and auditors that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) did not understand how a relatively little known benefit was causing oceans of misery and hardship for carers.

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Suppressed DWP study told of hardship endured by carers forced to repay thousands after minor allowance breaches

Ministers were warned three years ago that unpaid carers were being treated unfairly and forced to repay huge sums for minor benefit breaches, a long suppressed government report has revealed.

A Department for Work and Pensions document presented to politicians in 2021 detailed how carers – the majority of whom were on low incomes and spending 65 hours a week caring for loved ones – endured financial hardship, stress and anger after being heavily penalised for falling foul of strict carer’s allowance eligibility rules.

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But coroner finds no evidence to suggest trust directly caused death of Maya Siek in December 2022

An inquest into the death of a six-year-old girl has concluded an NHS hospital trust made a “number of failures” in her care before she died.

However, a coroner found there was no evidence that suggested the trust had directly caused or contributed to the death of Maya Siek in December 2022.

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