Woman arrested after stillbirth due to suspicions she had ‘illegal abortion’ (in the UK)

[SwissBall]

apple.news/AOG-G5JvRShu3qWU3l_SAwQ

Held in custody for 36 hours.

Thanks Andouillete x

Of course this is a terrible mistake to make, but if they had legitimate reasons to suspect someone of infanticide, wouldn't it be more disturbing if they had not immediately discharge them into police custody? If they genuinely suspected a child had been murdered, the suspect would be classed as an immediate danger to the public.

FFS She was hardly going to re offend, at least not for another 6 months. This women was no threat to anyone and had just had her baby die.

There was no infanticide ffs. There was a foetus inside a woman. It’s disturbing that she WAS taken into police custody.

Abortion not infanticide
Abortion not murder
And if they can't work out that someone who may have had an illegal abortion is not a danger to the public unless the public intends on crawling up her uterus then they need to apply a little more critical thinking

They did not suspect that she had murdered a baby. They suspected (suspect) that she had a termination. Not the same thing.

Also - if a woman did find herself in a situation where she thought she needed to kill her newborn I would argue very strongly that serious mental health support, not criminalisation, would be what was needed in that situation.

The law absolutely should criminalise people performing illegal abortions. It shouldn't criminalise women who access an illegal abortion.

(not saying that was the case here, but it would also stop this situation happening again)

I think ultimately women need to know it's always going to be safe for them to present at a hospital with pregnancy complications.

WhatNoRaisins · Today 07:32
I think ultimately women need to know it's always going to be safe for them to present at a hospital with pregnancy complications.

Yes, what a warning this is.

There are 1 in 200 still births/ late pregnancy miscarriages and not all even have a known explanation.

OMG this is awful. WTAF? Never underestimate misogyny.

I have a condition called unicornuate uterus. It is often undiagnosed until a woman ends up having an emergence c-section, or (as in my case) problems conceiving.

The following outcomes are likely:
Prematurity – 44%
Ectopic pregnancy – 4%
First-trimester abortion – 24.3%
Second-trimester abortion – 9.7%
Intrauterine fetal demise – 10.5%

In fact I am only 29.2% likely to actually have a live birth if I managed to get pregnant.

If I had managed to get pregnant, and I didn't know about my condition I could be this woman.

In a case from 2021:
In the case of the 15-year-old, police were called by hospital staff who believed the teenager had taken a substance bought on the internet to end her pregnancy. They were aware that she had previously contacted an abortion provider to obtain information about a possible termination, and that it could not go ahead because it was just after the 24-week legal limit.
The teenager’s phone and laptop were seized and examined for evidence of supposed wrongdoing, including text messages she had exchanged with her boyfriend expressing worry about the pregnancy. The case was dropped after postmortem tests found the baby had probably been stillborn because of natural causes, according to a report seen by the Observer.

I could have been this girl, or any of the other 67 women investigated over the last 10 years.

Apparently the possible punishment is up to 14 years in prison. If any of these women have been raped their rapists would spend less time in prison.

This needs to be decriminalized.

Covidagainandagain · Today 13:17

Thank you for sharing this from your own experience. It must be very difficult.

That is another sad story about the 15 year old. Of course that girl might have been like you.

And if her baby hadn’t died because of a condition like yours, or another not yet medically understood factor which is the case in a proportion of still births, if it was indeed a back street abortion, goodness knows what she had been through to find herself in that predicament. She was apart from anything else a child. I hope it would never have been her they punished.

Sometimes it seems worth all women giving up their telephone and laptops so the police can stop seizing them. Whatever did the police do before they were invented?