Police told how to investigate women after pregnancy loss
The National Police Chief Council (NPCC) is further fuelling hostility and suspicion against women and women’s rights to bodily autonomy, as well as making access to a proposition which could find women under investigation in updated national guidance.
The new guidance directs police to search women’s homes for abortion medication. It also directs police to seize women’s digital devices to check women’s internet history, messages to friends and family, and menstrual tracker apps, in an effort to help investigators “establish a woman’s knowledge and intention related to the pregnancy”.
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In a time when the government is being called on to decriminalise abortion, there are also unprecedented numbers of investigations into women. Abortion providers, BPAS and MSI Reproductive, said they have received hundreds of police requests for patient data in the past few years.
This is not care for a woman in a time of need, but criminalisation of potentially deeply traumatic experiences. Campaigners are warning that the policy further risks the health and safety of women and further erosion of rights.
Katie Saxon, Chief Strategic Communications Officer at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, spoke to Cosmopolitan and said: "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 But to see it in black and white, after years of criticisms of the way an outdated law is enforced, is harrowing.”
She continued: “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."
Throughout history there have been many eras of overt oppression and prejudice against women. Today we exist in a culture where conservatism and puritanical religious liberties are increasingly being weaponised against women’s rights. There are unprecedented threats to women’s access to medical healthcare and surveillance of women’s bodies.
The latest guidance is implemented with no consultation from abortion providers. It reminds women that their bodies are political playgrounds and criminalised for how they use them.
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A historical law from 1861 remains a threat to women, women could be at risk of facing up to life imprisonment if a strict criteria is not met when having an abortion. The Abortion Act 1967 outlined a number of specific circumstances wherein a legal termination of pregnancy can take place.
Cosmopolitan UK is working with BPAS (a UK abortion provider) along with over thirty women’s rights groups and healthcare organisations to call on MPs to repeal the 1861 law.
