By a vote of 379 to 137, British MPs yesterday moved an amendment to cease criminalising women who undergo abortions after the legal 24-week limit. Despite the backlash from anti-abortion groups, this news should be welcomed. Not only will this change in the law prevent women who have suffered miscarriages being harried by suspicious police, or the cruel haranguing of others in desperate circumstances, it is another blow to the archaic 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which uses Victorian law to stifle women’s freedom.

Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill states that “no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy.” It’s worth remembering just how extreme the Offences Against the Person Act is when it comes to abortion. Section 58, now repealed, demands that “every woman, being with child, who, with intent to procure her own miscarriage, shall unlawfully administer to herself any poison or other noxious thing… shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable… to be kept in penal servitude for life.” Until yesterday afternoon, Britain’s justice system had the power to put women in jail for life for procuring an abortion — a now safe, swift and common procedure.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for female bodily autonomy, but removing the state’s ability to jail women for abortions is a low bar for liberation. The 1967 Abortion Act might have made abortion practically easier to obtain in the UK, in no small part thanks to a liberal approach by sensible healthcare professionals, but it did so by demanding that a woman convince two separate doctors that she is essentially either going mad or going to kill herself if forced to take a pregnancy to term.

Antoniazzi reassured Parliament that yesterday’s vote was “a narrow, targeted measure that does not change how abortion services are provided, nor the rules set by the 1967 Abortion Act”. The law is an insult to women’s equal standing in society and a barrier to our ability to make free decisions about our future. Liberal Democrat MP Angus MacDonald yesterday asked Antoniazzi if “a woman goes all the way through to full term and then decides it is an inconvenience, does the Honourable Lady still think that she should be covered by this legal protection? Yet “inconvenience” is a funny word to use to reflect what a woman seeking a late-term abortion might be going through.

Abortion is two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it is a medical procedure to end an unwanted or unviable pregnancy. But while it remains restricted by law, abortion also exists on a moral plane in which it represents society’s trust in women. Choice is such a crucial word within the debate because the choice to end or keep a pregnancy will affect all choices thereafter for that pregnant woman. Children fundamentally change who you are. This is what makes motherhood — when it’s wanted — such a joy. When you don’t want a baby, a pregnancy is a problem. Abortion restrictions coerce women into becoming mothers by denying them the freedom to choose their own destiny. In a society that claims to be invested in equal rights and treatment for men and women, this is plainly wrong.

In her arguments for the amendment in the House of Commons, Antoniazzi told the stories of women who had suffered under the previous law criminalising abortion. Nicola Packer spent four-and-a-half years being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service after there were complications in her abortion treatment. Another woman was jailed for two years after her abusive partner coerced her into taking abortion medication. Perhaps most shocking is the story of a mother who went into spontaneous, early labour but had her bins searched by police officers as she tried to resuscitate her baby despite calling an ambulance. It is a great victory for justice that other women will not suffer the same cruelty following this legal change.

But now the real work begins. The anti-abortion Right is gearing up for a fight, and those of us on the pro-choice side need to find the stomach for it. Some are condemning Antoniazzi for importing culture-war extremism from the States, but this is nonsense. Unlike toppling statues, abortion — or lack of access to it — is literally life-changing for women. We need to meet the concerns of pro-lifers head-on, and convince people why it is more important to defend women’s freedoms than speculate on the potential of the life of the “unborn”. We should not shy away from the prospect that women might make what some consider to be bad decisions, but argue that they should be her decisions to make and hers alone.

Among the noise of the usual religious types or MPs obsessed with turning women into baby-makers were a handful of surprising gender-critical voices, queasy at the prospect of late-term abortions. In the face of such misunderstanding of women in dire straits, we need to assure people that they can feel however they want about abortion, but that shouldn’t mean forcing another woman to reap the consequences of their discomfort. Decriminalisation is a positive step. Now let’s keep talking.

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Ella Whelan is a freelance journalist, commentator and author of What Women Want: Fun, Freedom and an End to Feminism.

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