PART I.
Prosecuted, shamed and traumatised for the mistake of taking abortion pills too late
In 2020, Nicola had an abortion — then she was arrested and put on trial. Now, five years later, she was found not guilty. She hopes she will be the last woman in England prosecuted under the archaic Offences against the Person Act of 1861.
Nicola 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?’”
Nicola 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.
She was arrested more than four years ago but she still lives with the aftermath every day. “If I see police officers walking down the street, I’ll cross the road,” she says. “I would avoid going to hospital now for any reason, if I could.”
Last Thursday, at the end of a three-week trial, she was found not guilty of knowingly taking abortion pills after the legal time limit.
An increasing number of women have been put on trial [in England] for ending their pregnancy in this way. Nicola is one of six to have appeared in an English court since December 2022. Previously, only three trials had been held since the law was introduced.
In her case, evidence seen by The Observer shows how the Metropolitan Police (the Met) and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advocated for her case to continue to trial. The CPS refused in 2021 to move forward with the Met’s initial charge, which the force then appealed.
An officer said the decision to arrest Nicola on 8 November 2020 went “all the way up the chain”. The Metropolitan Police said it was “mindful” the case would have been “incredibly difficult” for her but that its “officers conducted a proportionate and evidence-led investigation”.
The CPS has said its prosecutors “exercise the greatest care when considering complex and traumatic cases such as this one” and that since July 2022, decisions in abortion cases like Packer’s were made at the “most senior level”.
It was 2 November 2020, when Nicola took a pregnancy test. She had recently been feeling unwell, but having long struggled with chronic indigestion and endometriosis, a painful condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside of the womb, she thought little of it. When the test showed positive, she immediately went online and booked in for a termination.
At-home abortions for early stage pregnancies had been approved that March as a response to the Covid pandemic, after years of calls from abortion providers to offer telemedicine to make the service more accessible. After telephone consultations, Packer was prescribed two medications – mifepristone and misoprostol – for her to take at home.
Based on the date of what she believed had been her last period, and as she had no other symptoms, Nicola believed she was about six weeks pregnant. But after taking the pills, she found herself in the early hours of 7 November giving birth in her bathroom to what she now knows was a 22 to 26-week-old foetus.
Still in shock, she arrived at Charing Cross Hospital’s Accident & Emergency ward with the foetus in a rucksack, wrapped in scarves. She initially didn’t tell medics she had taken the pills, worried she wouldn’t receive the care she needed.
But after transferring to Chelsea and Westminster hospital for more treatment, she told the midwives. “I thought I could trust them,” she says. They called the police, a move described by Dr Jonathan Lord, a leading consultant, as “an egregious breach of confidentiality”.
The trial, which lasted nearly three weeks, was the culmination of more than four years of investigation, during which Nicola’s sexual and medical history was combed through by police and prosecutors, her urine forensically tested for more than 200 drugs, her phone checked for suspicious Google searches, and her earnings spent on thousands of pounds of legal costs.
As abortion rights are rolled back in many parts of the world, particularly the US, there is movement in the UK parliament to bring the law up to date and to end the practice of prosecuting women for abortion. More than 30 medical, legal and public health bodies have been calling on MPs to take urgent action on the issue.
This week, Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi tabled an amendment to the crime and policing bill that would decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. Antoniazzi, who came to court to hear some of Nicola’s evidence, told The Observer: “The true injustice here is the years of her life stolen by a law written decades before women had the vote. This is utterly deplorable, and it is not justice. I do not see how this law can be defended any longer.”
The unanimous verdict [of not guilty] in Nicola’s favour was announced at [the local Crown Court. “It seems like a whole other lifetime ago,” she says. A friend who has supported her through the investigation and trial, sits beside her. When Nicola first told her what had happened, she was sure her friend would be OK – that the charges would be dropped, that no one would try to put her in jail for what she was sure was a horrible, tragic mistake.
“All these long years, I kept saying to her, this is crazy. Don’t worry, it’s going to go away. How could they possibly bring it to trial? And then we’re sitting in a court.” When the jury retired to consider the verdict, her friend was no longer convinced she would be OK. “It was terrifying I didn’t know which way it was going to go. We were gripping each other’s hands so you could see the bone and literally shaking, and just like shutting our eyes and trying not to cry… I don’t believe in God, but I was praying.
“I think people need to understand the impact of four and a half years of this. You watch what that does to a person, and you watch your friend diminish before your eyes. They don’t bounce around like they used to, they don’t smile like they used to. They’re fearful every day.”
According to abortion providers, for every woman who ends up in court, at least 10 others are subjected to prolonged police investigations – some of which have led to children being separated from women who were then never formally charged.
Critics [read: anti-abortion] have argued that cases such as Nicola’s should be used as justification to roll back access to an at-home abortion for women in England. About 60% of the roughly 250,000 women who access abortion through the NHS every year now choose to take the pills at home, according to the most recent government figures.
Nicola turned 46 this week, but her early 40s have hardly felt real. “The last four and a half years have just been so concentrated on: when is the trial going to happen? How am I going to get through it? You kind of forget that you used to do loads of things before this happened, and your whole life just becomes about that one thing. You’re doing it, but you’re not entirely there. You’re always thinking about the other thing you have hanging over you.”
Nicola, who is sitting in front of a copy of Helena Kennedy’s book, Misjustice: How British Law is Failing Women, is to file a complaint with the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service over her treatment during her arrest and the decisions made in the subsequent investigation. “This was a terrible accident,” she says. “I really do hope I’m the last person to ever go through this. It’s absolutely awful. Soul-destroying.”
SOURCE: The Observer, by Phoebe Davis, 16 May 2025.
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PART II.
Police could search homes and phones after pregnancy loss
This article, published two days after the previous one, states that “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.
“Details are also provided for how police could bypass legal requirements for a court order to obtain medical records about a woman’s abortion from NHS providers.
Abortion law in the UK is based on the Offences Against the Person Act from 1861. In recent years, an increasing number of women have been investigated and prosecuted under this law. The Abortion Act of 1967 allows women to end their pregnancies under medical supervision up to 24 weeks, or beyond in certain circumstances, such as if the life of the mother is at risk or if the foetus has a serious abnormality.
The guidance replaces a 2014 document that did not mention investigating stillbirths, but had one mention of investigating women who may have had an illegal abortion. The new guidance, published in January and developed by a sub-group of the NPCC’s Homicide Working Group alongside the College of Policing, National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police, covers the scenario over several pages.
Dr Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), said: “The new guidance is shocking. Women in these circumstances have a right to compassionate care and to have their dignity and privacy respected, not to have their homes, phones, computers and health apps searched, or be arrested and interrogated.”
Leading abortion providers, legal experts and medical professionals have told The Observer newspaper they were not consulted over the NPCC guidance and called for it to be amended.
Three representatives of leading British abortion providers are quoted in this article, who express “concern”, that the advice is “harrowing”, and that it “fuels a culture of hostility and suspicion towards abortion and pregnancy loss”.
SOURCE: The Observer, by Phoebe Davis, 18 May 2025
Editor’s Comment
by Marge Berer, 22 May 2025
The apparent basis for all this blatantly illegal snooping trying to find “a crime” is the assumption that a growing number of pregnant women are obtaining abortion pills from unofficial sources and thereby breaking the 19th and 20th century (1861 and 1967) British laws on abortion, under which all abortions are illegal (1861) and since 1967, that two doctors need to approve every abortion for it to be considered legal.
I could say: “Of course, what did you expect! Are you idiots?”
Or I could say, which would be far more useful: “Of course, what did you expect! Why haven’t you formed a Parliamentary committee working with the abortion rights movement to substantially update our pathetically out-of-date laws and make it legal for anyone needing an abortion to buy the pills in their local pharmacy and use them, as is possible in Canada, for example, and which has harmed no one. It is based on WHO guidance regarding safety and having a complete abortion, with the support of abortion providers, and has led to women having abortions earlier than waiting for clinic appointments!! It is time to drop control by abortion providers, who should no longer be used as policemen, let alone the snooping of policemen themselves, violating all the rules of confidentiality, but instead to provide support if and as requested by the woman or girl — when required. And above all, not with the threat of fascist police behaviour, which is what is being instituted here, up to now without public knowledge, and I would bet backed by the inevitable anti-abortion, anti-women brigade from somewhere.