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

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

USA – What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.

Amy Littlefield
May 13, 2025

Ayana, 28 years old and 28 weeks pregnant, eases herself onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy.

Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already stretched thin.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

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 – Illegal abortion accused ‘shocked’ by pregnancy

May 1, 2025

A woman who denies having an illegal abortion has told a court she would not have gone through with the termination had she known how far along she was in her pregnancy.

Nicola Packer, 45, took medicine at home to induce a miscarriage on 6 November 2020, when she was about 26 weeks pregnant, her trial has heard. The outer limit for abortions in England, Scotland and Wales is 24 weeks.

Ms Packer told jurors she was "shocked and surprised" when she discovered the pregnancy was much further along than she thought, after delivering the female baby while on the toilet.

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g85xpexx9o

01.05.2025

News

Nicola Packer

prosecuting women for abortion

UK woman accused of using pills for illegal abortion during Covid lockdown

Nicola Packer, 44, was arrested at a London hospital after reporting a miscarriage in 2020, court told

Hannah Al-Othman
Thu 24 Apr 2025

A woman has gone on trial in London accused of illegally taking pills in order to induce an abortion during the second coronavirus lockdown.

Nicola Packer, 44, was arrested in November 2020 after she went to hospital having miscarried a foetus, and later reported to staff that she had taken abortion medication.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/24/uk-woman-accused-using-pills-abortion-covid-lockdown

24.04.2025

News

Abortion Act 1967

arresting women for abortion

Marie Stopes

MSI International

Nicola Packer

prosecuting women for abortion

UK – Abortion could be decriminalised in England and Wales

The 164-year-old law banning abortion was amended in 1967 and again in 1991

By Neil Shaw, Assistant Editor
11 MAR 2025

Proposals to remove criminal sanctions for abortion in England and Wales are expected to be revived by MPs trying to amend the Crime and Policing Bill. Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) said women continue to be at risk of prosecution as the Commons heard 100 have been investigated by police in the last five years.

The 164-year-old law banning abortion was amended in 1967, legalising abortion with an authorised provider up to 28 weeks, which was later lowered to 24 weeks in 1991. There are very limited circumstances that allow an abortion after 24 weeks, such as when the mother’s life is at risk or the child would be born with a severe disability.

Continued: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/abortion-could-decriminalised-england-wales-10011474

11.03.2025

News

1967 Abortion Act

Offence Against the Person Act

prosecuting women for abortion

Louisiana mother pleads not guilty following abortion pill indictment

By: Lorena O'Neil
March 11, 2025

A mother from Port Allen caught up in a landmark abortion pills case pleaded not guilty Tuesday to felony criminal charges for allegedly providing her minor daughter with medication to end her pregnancy.

The woman was indicted Jan. 31 for allegedly giving her teen daughter pills she had obtained through the mail. Dr. Margaret Carpenter, the New York physician who allegedly prescribed and sent the pills to Louisiana, was also indicted on felony changes. It’s the first criminal case of its kind in the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Continued: https://lailluminator.com/2025/03/11/abortion-pill-10/

USA – Anti-Abortion Activists See Their Moon-Shot Goal Within Reach

And we’re already experiencing the consequences.

By Mary Ziegler
Feb 14, 2025

In 2022 the Louisiana Legislature became the first to advance a bill to criminalize abortion seekers. While conservative states often punish women for pregnancy-related conduct, as the group Pregnancy Justice documents, jurisdictions that ban abortion have been careful to stress that they don’t punish women for abortion itself. And when Louisiana came close to doing that, the most powerful national anti-abortion organizations moved to kill the bill, arguing that the movement was united in viewing women as victims, not perpetrators, of abortion.

That might have been it: The movement’s powers that be had spoken, and the case was closed. But this legislative session has already seen a wave of bills authorizing the punishment of abortion patients, proposed by so-called abortion abolitionists, who argue that their bills are the only way for the anti-abortion movement to be logically consistent, as well as morally (and biblically) justified.

Continued; https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/anti-abortion-legislation-fetal-personhood.html