UK – Shocking new rules mean police can now access your period app — 3 ways to protect yourself

What the new guidelines mean – and how to safeguard your data

By Chloe Gray
21 May 2025

Experts are saying they will 'aggressively challenge' new police guidance suggesting women’s homes should be searched for abortion drugs and phones checked for menstrual cycle tracking apps after unexpected pregnancy loss.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has said that investigators looking into the causes of stillbirth and miscarriage should look at digital devices to 'establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy.'

Continued: https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/female-health/a64813827/police-menstrual-tracking-apps-miscarriage-abortion/

Why abortion rights in the UK are getting more and more perilous

Campaigners say confused health professionals are driving the increasing prosecutions of women. Others blame the police. But ultimately, the Crown Prosecution Service has questions to answer

Zoe Williams
Mon 19 May 2025

Earlier this month, Nicola Packer was found not guilty of illegally terminating a pregnancy, after taking abortion pills beyond the legal limit of 10 weeks. She had spent more than four years living in the shadow of this prosecution, every detail of which – as reported by Phoebe Davis – is completely harrowing. In 2020, Packer was arrested before she left Chelsea and Westminster hospital, still bleeding from major surgery.

Packer is one of six women to be prosecuted for this crime in England since the end of 2022, under the Offences Against the Person Act, which had previously only been used in such cases three times since its introduction in 1861. Even that striking, inexplicable figure doesn’t begin to describe how many people have fallen victim to these prosecutions. There have been cases of women denied contact with their children while police investigated a charge that came to nothing. A teenager who had a late miscarriage was arrested in front of her entire street – her privacy, her education, her peace of mind completely destroyed.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2025/may/19/why-abortion-rights-in-the-uk-are-getting-more-and-more-perilous

Inside the fight to decriminalise abortion in the UK

More than 50 MPs have backed an amendment to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. But does it offer real change, and why is it being championed by those with anti-trans sentiments?

Halima Jibril
May 19, 2025

Last Wednesday (May 14), more than 50 cross-party MPs backed an amendment proposing to “decriminalise” abortion in England and Wales. Put forward by Welsh Labour Party MP, Tonia Antoniazzi, the amendment seeks to remove “women from criminal law related to abortion” and would mean “no offence is committed by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy”. MPs were set to vote on the amendment last summer, but parliament dissolved ahead of the 2024 general election.

The landscape of abortion in the UK is more complex than one might think. Abortion is technically “legal” in England, Scotland and Wales, and yet it is also a criminal offence. Below is an explainer on the 164-year-old law that makes abortion a criminal offence, what the amendment is fighting to change (and keep the same) and if activists and campaigners believe the amendment goes far enough in protecting people’s right to an abortion in the UK.

Continued: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/66834/1/inside-the-fight-to-decriminalise-abortion-in-the-uk-england-wales

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

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

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

Commentary

Charing Cross hospital

Jonathan Lord

MSI Reproductive Choices

Nicola Packer

prosecuting women for abortion

UK woman accused of illegal abortion says she told medics she had miscarried

Nicola Packer tells court she had feared hospital staff ‘wouldn’t help me’ if they knew she had taken abortion pills

Raphael Boyd
Fri 2 May 2025

A woman on trial accused of having an illegal abortion has said she told hospital staff she had miscarried as she feared them knowing the truth would affect the level of care she received.

Nicola Packer, 45, took abortion medicine during the Covid lockdown in November 2020, after being prescribed the pills in a remote consultation with a registered provider, a jury at Isleworth crown court heard.

She is charged with “unlawfully administering to herself a poison or other noxious thing” with the “intent to procure a miscarriage”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/02/uk-woman-accused-of-abortion-says-she-told-medics-she-had-miscarried

02.05.2025