Here in the U.S., despite Roe v. Wade being decided in 1973, advocates have still tracked well over 2,000 criminal cases involving pregnancy loss and abortion in the decades since. These cases have been on the rise since the Supreme Court overturned Roe with the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling: In the first year post-Dobbs, alone, Pregnancy Justice tracked more than 200 people arrested over pregnancy-related criminal charges—the most cases in a single year period since the organization began tracking this data. People in the U.S. have faced charges like gross abuse of a corpse, child endangerment and involuntary manslaughter for pregnancy loss, or “improper” disposal of miscarriage remains—proving, as one legal expert previously told Jezebel, that “you don’t need an abortion ban to criminalize pregnancy.”
Sadly, this isn’t isolated to the U.S. As of this week, police in the U.K. have received chillingly detailed guidance on how to search women’s phones, homes, and menstrual tracking apps to build criminal cases against them after they’ve experienced pregnancy loss. The guidance, obtained and reviewed by the Observer, comes from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and advises U.K. police on best practices for carrying out a “child death investigation”—including by searching for “drugs that can terminate pregnancy” in cases involving stillbirths.
The guidance also instructs police on seizing women’s phones and digital devices so that investigators can “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention in relation to the pregnancy,” by reviewing her internet searches, reading text messages to friends and families, and also reviewing fertility trackers.
Experts speaking to both the Observer and Cosmopolitan UK warned that criminal charges related to pregnancy and abortion have been on the rise in the U.K. in recent years, even as abortion under most circumstances is legal there. Still, an 1861 law that threatens people who have abortions with life in prison remains on the books, and in the last two years alone, at least six women have been forced to appear in court facing criminal charges under the 19th-century law, per Cosmopolitan UK. This has prompted a wave of U.K. women’s rights organizations to call for its repeal.
Katie Saxon, chief strategic communications officer at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, said in a statement that the NPCC guidance presents the “clearest sign yet that women cannot rely on the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, or the courts to protect them—the only way to stop this is to remove women from the criminal law on abortion.”
“As an abortion provider, we know how the police treat women suspected of breaking abortion law. But to see it in black and white, after years of criticisms of the way an outdated law is enforced, is harrowing,” Saxon said. “To write it without any public conversation or discussion with experts, to tell police to use women’s period trackers and medical records against them, to tell them to evade the restrictions of medical confidentiality shows just how detached from reality the NPCC are.”
The guidance’s focus on wielding women’s phones and digital histories is especially notable, because this has proven a highly effective tactic to collect evidence against women in the U.S.—like Purvi Patel in 2015, whose online searches for abortion pills and text messages about taking them contributed to misapplied feticide charges she faced; or Lattice Fisher in 2018, whose online searches for abortion pills shortly before her stillbirth were similarly wielded by police to build their manslaughter case against her; or a teenage girl in Nebraska whose online messages about having an abortion in 2022 helped prosecutors sentence her to jail for concealing and abandoning a dead body. Menstrual tracking apps have rarely been used in cases like this, but the overt threat of police trying to seize this data is alarming, nonetheless. (There are, however, period tracking apps like Euki, which automatically delete your personal data for your safety, and are supported by reproductive justice organizations and legal advocates.)
It’s also notable that the U.K. guidance purportedly advises on “child death” investigations. On the surface, this appears unrelated to abortion. But as we’ve seen in the U.S., the overly broad policing of everything from pregnancy loss to abortion has rendered all pregnancies innately, criminally suspicious. The threat of facing criminal charges for alleged substance use during pregnancy, or a miscarriage, or how you do or don’t handle remains from a miscarriage or stillbirth, has always existed. All of this has been exacerbated by abortion bans.
In response to the backlash to its guidance, NPCC issued a statement attempting to clarify that “an investigation is only initiated where there is credible information to suggest criminal activity, and this would often be because of concerns raised from medical professionals. Each case would have a set of unique factors to be assessed and investigated depending on its individual circumstances.” The statement continues, “We recognise how traumatic the experience of losing a child is, with many complexities involved, and any investigation of this nature and individuals will always be treated with the utmost sensitivity and compassion. There is no standardised policy to investigate illegal abortions. Police will always work closely with health partners to prioritise the welfare of everyone involved.”
But these words should do little to assuage concerns. Research has shown that in cases involving criminal charges or investigations involving self-managed abortion, specifically, women are often reported to police by health care workers. Widespread confusion about mandatory reporting requirements and what health workers are and aren’t required to report to police contributes to a pipeline that can all too often implicate pregnant patients from the medical system into the criminal system.
Louise McCudden, MSI Reproductive Choices’ UK Head of External Affairs, condemned the NPCC’s guidance in a statement warning that this will further contribute to a “culture of hostility and suspicion towards abortion and pregnancy loss.”
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