Scotland – Paramedic secretly injected pregnant woman with abortion drug to kill unborn child

Stephen Doohan, 33, concocted the plan after the woman he met while married told him she was having his baby.

STV News
May 17, 2025

A paramedic secretly gave a pregnant woman an abortion drug killing her unborn child. Stephen Doohan concocted the plan after she told him she was having his baby.

The 33-year-old – who was a clinical team leader with the Scottish Ambulance Service – was married at the time. He crushed pills into a syringe before administering the medication as she lay in bed at his home in Edinburgh in 2023.

Continued: https://news.stv.tv/east-central/paramedic-secretly-injected-pregnant-woman-with-abortion-drug-to-kill-unborn-child

17.05.2025

reproductive coercion

Scottish Ambulance Service

Stephen Doohan

Europe

Scotland

UK – Police could search homes and phones after pregnancy loss

New national guidance suggests officers look for menstrual tracking apps or abortion drugs

Saturday 17 May 2025
Phoebe Davis

Police have been issued guidance on how to search women’s homes for abortion drugs and check their phones for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.

New guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) on “child death investigation” advises officers to search for “drugs that can terminate pregnancy” in cases involving stillbirths. The NPCC, which sets strategic direction for policing across the country UK, also suggests a woman’s digital devices could be seized to help investigators “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy”. That could include checking a woman’s internet searches, messages to friends and family, and health apps, “such as menstrual cycle and fertility trackers”, it states.

Continued: https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/police-could-search-homes-and-seize-phones-after-sudden-pregnancy-loss

UK – Prosecuted, shamed and traumatised for mistake of taking abortion pills too late

In 2020, Nicola Packer had an abortion - then was arrested and put on trial. Now, found not guilty, she hopes she will be the last woman in history prosecuted under England’s archaic law

Friday 16 May 2025
Phoebe Davis

Nicola Packer was still bleeding from major surgery when she was arrested, escorted by two police officers out of hospital, put in the back of a van and taken to Charing Cross police station.

She saw strangers’ faces, patients and staff staring at her. “You look around to see if people are looking at you, thinking, ‘Oh my God, what has she done?”

Packer is sitting on her sofa at home in a small seaside town. The living room leads out on to a patio covered in flower pots, where she likes to spend her evenings after work.

Continued: https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/prosecuted-shamed-and-traumatised-for-mistake-of-taking-abortion-pills-too-late

Scotland – Arrested anti-abortion protester ‘willing to go to jail’

May 15, 2025

A woman who was arrested for taking part in an anti-abortion protest outside of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow has said she is prepared to go to prison over the offence.

Rose Docherty, 74, became the first person to be arrested and charged under a new law which creates buffer zones outside Scottish abortion clinics in February.

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36507lw234o

15.05.2025

News

40 days for life

Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act

anti-choice protesters

Dr Greg Irwin

Gillian Mackay

JD Vance

Queen Elizabeth University hospital

Abortion decriminalisation plans pushed by Labour MP

May 14, 2025
Sam Francis, BBC News

A Labour MP has launched a bid to decriminalise abortions, after campaigners revealed estimates that police have prosecuted more than 100 women under abortion laws in recent years.

Abortion remains a criminal offence in England and Wales unless under strict circumstances - including taking place before 24 weeks into the pregnancy with the approval of two doctors - under a 164-year-old law.

Tonia Antoniazzi, Labour MP for Gower, tabled an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to decriminalise the process without "changing anything about provision of abortion care".

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dqp3dep48o

14.05.2025

News

abortion law reform

conscientious objection

decriminalisation of abortion

Nicola Packer

Offences Against the Person Act 1861

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists

UK – The Guardian view on abortion prosecutions: decriminalisation can’t wait

The trial of Nicola Packer shows why MPs should seize the opportunity to change the law and safeguard vulnerable women now

Editorial
Wed 14 May 2025

The Crown Prosecution Service has yet to explain why it thought that pursuing a case against Nicola Packer was in the public interest. Thankfully, jurors last week cleared the 45-year-old of illegally terminating her pregnancy. But more than four years of police and criminal proceedings have had a lasting impact on a woman already traumatised by discovering that she was 26 weeks pregnant, not about 10, when she acted. The trial dragged her private life – even her sexual preferences – into the public eye. Understandably, she called it “humiliating”. But it is prosecutors who should feel shame.

Ms Packer was prescribed abortion pills in a remote consultation, due to a Covid lockdown. Prosecutors alleged that she deliberately breached the abortion time limit. Jurors believed Ms Packer, who said that she was horrified to realise how advanced her pregnancy was when she saw the foetus and that she “wouldn’t have put the baby or myself through it” had she known.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/14/the-guardian-view-on-abortion-prosecutions-decriminalisation-cant-wait

14.05.2025

Editorial

1967 Abortion Act

British Medical Association

Crown Prosecution Service

decriminalisation of abortion

UK – ‘I was right to be frightened’: Nicola Packer on the humiliation and trauma of her trial for illegal abortion

Acquitted woman wants to ensure there is never again an abortion trial in England

Hannah Al-Othman
Tue 13 May 2025

“I hate sitting in silence now,” Nikki Packer says. A quiet room reminds her too much of the police cell she was locked into just hours after undergoing a traumatic stillbirth.

Arrested in hospital by uniformed officers while still recovering from surgery, she was accused of carrying out an illegal abortion. It took four-and-a-half years for her case to come to court, where last week she was unanimously cleared by a jury.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/13/i-hate-sitting-in-silence-now-nicola-packer-on-clearing-her-name-after-the-trauma-of-her-abortion-trial

13.05.2025

The right to abortion is under threat in Britain. Secure it now – or risk losing it

Decriminalisation is finally possible – but unless we future-proof the law against anti-abortion extremists, the right to choose hangs in the balance

Stella Creasy
Mon 12 May 2025

Opening the Pandora’s box of abortion reform is something no one should do without the confidence that they are able to manage the resulting chaos. Moves to decriminalise abortion, in response to the continued prosecution of women for having one, could unintentionally enable the restriction of access under a future regressive government. To prevent this and protect services, it is time to write into our statute that safe and legal access to abortion is a human right across our nation.

It still shocks many people to realise that in 2025 abortion is not actually legal for most of the UK. Only in Northern Ireland do women have a right to an abortion. Everywhere else they are exempted from prosecution if it is determined they have met certain access conditions. This is not a quaint jurisprudence debate – it is driving the explosion in recent years of investigations and prosecutions of women and girls for having abortions in England.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/12/britain-abortion-right-decriminalisation-law

12.05.2025

Commentary

abortion law reform

buffer zones

decriminalisation of abortion

UK woman who took pills during lockdown cleared of illegal abortion

Nicola Packer, 45, was prescribed medication but was accused of believing she was more than 10 weeks pregnant

Hannah Al-Othman, North of England correspondent
Thu 8 May 2025

A woman has been cleared of illegally terminating a pregnancy, after taking abortion pills during lockdown.

Nicola Packer took the pills at home in November 2020. She had been prescribed mifepristone and misoprostol after a remote consultation.

She later delivered a foetus, which the court heard was estimated to be about 26 weeks in gestation, which she brought with her to Chelsea and Westminster hospital, Isleworth crown court heard.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/08/uk-woman-who-took-pills-during-lockdown-cleared-of-abortion

08.05.2025

British Pregnancy Advisory Service

prosecuting women for abortion

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists

UK – ‘Utterly traumatised’: anger at ordeal of UK woman accused of illegal abortion

Calls for law change after ‘cruel and unnecessary investigation’ into Nicola Packer that CPS brought to trial

Hannah Al-Othman and Raphael Boyd
Thu 8 May 2025

When Nicola Packer took a pregnancy test in November 2020, as the country was in lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, she did not even believe she was pregnant.

Aged 41 at the time, she thought it more likely that she was perimenopausal, but had been feeling under the weather and when her friend – with whom the pregnancy had been conceived – suggested she took a test, she only did so to “prove him wrong”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/08/anger-ordeal-woman-accused-abortion-nicola-packer

08.05.2025