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”.