When Nikki Packer was 41, she took abortion medicine at home in lockdown. While recovering in hospital, she was arrested, accused of having an unlawful abortion and transported to a police cell while still in pain.
Under legislation introduced during Covid, abortion pills can be sent by post, but only for those who are up to 10 weeks pregnant. Packer was estimated to be 26 weeks along. If found guilty, she could have faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Packer has always maintained she would have never taken the medication if she had known she was that far along. After four and a half years of legal limbo, a jury unanimously agreed with her and she was acquitted. Packer wept when the verdict was read out in court in May. Later on, she told the Guardian, “Abortion is healthcare. It should not be treated as anything other than that.”
Britain likes to pretend that it is more enlightened in many areas than other countries, particularly when it comes to the issue of reproductive health. When I was editor of Broadly, a feminist platform, I was told that backstreet abortions were a thing of the distant past here.
Abortion is seen as one of those politically thorny issues that we litigated decades ago. Those poor Yanks in South Dakota or Tennessee, where abortion is banned with no exceptions whatsoever – that could never happen here.
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Except, except: Take Nikki Packer’s case, or the recent news that police have been handed guidelines on how to search homes for abortion drugs, seize laptops and phones, check private messages to family and friends and even access period and fertility tracker apps in supposedly suspicious cases of stillbirth. That’s right – you could be going through a traumatic miscarriage, only to be investigated by officers for illegally obtaining an abortion. A Tennessee lawmaker would be proud.
When Packer was found not guilty earlier this month, British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) spokesperson Katie Saxon sounded the alarm over this level of police overreach. “In recent years, we have seen record numbers of women investigated for suspected illegal abortions. Women are being arrested straight from the hospital ward, their homes searched, and their children taken away. This cannot continue.”
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which issued the police guidance, told the Observer that unexpected pregnancy loss was “not routinely investigated” – but medical experts and leading abortion providers, including BPAS (British Pregnancy Advisory Service), said they hadn’t even been consulted on the advice. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists described this as “shocking”.
BPAS has documented cases of police investigation that are harrowing: They include one woman who had called for medical assistance when her baby was born prematurely. Seven officers turned up and started rooting through her bins for evidence while she delivered mouth-to-mouth on her child, who was still attached by the umbilical cord. (Both survived.)
Another was hospitalised for complications resulting from a legally-obtained abortion, only to find upon being discharged that police had cordoned off her home and were searching her property.
You may be asking yourself: Why are police getting involved? Don’t we have the right to abortion in this country? Many people don’t know that abortion is criminalised in England and Wales under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, a law that dates back to the time of Queen Victoria.
Our right to a termination is only the result of an effective loophole created in 1967 by the Abortion Act, which allows for pregnancy to be terminated under strict circumstances, including the medical sign-off of two doctors.
If you’ve obtained an abortion in any other way, such as by purchasing pills online, you are breaking the law and could potentially face life in prison. According to BPAS, this makes England and Wales two of the most punitive places in the world for illegal abortions.
But, as Cosmopolitan points out in their new End 1861 campaign, the majority of those who obtain abortions outside of this strict criteria almost always involve mitigating circumstances, such as domestic abuse or violence. These cases should be treated with utmost compassion and sensitivity, not with handcuffs and a night in a jail cell.
The solution is painfully obvious: take abortion out of criminal law. This is not new territory – abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland six years ago, though Amnesty International warns that there are still barriers to access.
In June, MPs will vote on an amendment that would do just that by removing women who end their own pregnancy from the Offences Against the Person Act – a change that is supported by BPAS and over 30 professional bodies, including the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
This would not change anything else about existing abortion legislation, like the 24-week time limit or how abortion services are delivered. It would simply stop treating us like potential criminals, all for the sin of being pregnant.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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