A secret recording reveals the senior officer said “criminalisation of abortions” was not a “comfortable area for police to be operating in” after Nicola Packer was held in hospital
A senior police officer raised serious concerns over the controversial arrest of a woman who took abortion pills, a secret recording reveals.
Nicola Packer was held in hospital at the height of the Covid pandemic, a day after delivering a stillborn baby at home. The next day she was taken into custody in the back of a police van, still bleeding after undergoing major surgery. Ms Packer sobbed in the dock as she was acquitted earlier this month after going on trial accused of having an illegal abortion. Prosecutors had said she knew she was over the 10-week limit for an at-home abortion.
But a jury at Isleworth crown court in South West London acquitted her of unlawfully administering to herself a poison to procure a miscarriage in 2020. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the trial showed how outdated and harmful abortion law is.
A BBC File on 4 investigation has now published a recording of a 2020 meeting between Metropolitan Police officers and healthcare professionals. A senior officer in the Met’s child abuse investigation command at the time said: “It’s not a comfortable area for police to be operating in… any criminalisation around abortions.”
The officer also asked whether the arrest was “the best for Nicola” under the circumstances. Ms Packer was charged in 2023 following a police request to review the original Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute.
A Met Police spokesperson said it was “not unusual and is standard practice” for detectives to request that the CPS reviews its decisions. The jury heard that the defendant, then 41, took the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol in November 2020.
They had been prescribed to her after a remote consultation under temporary pandemic provisions allowing abortions at home for those up to ten weeks pregnant. Ms Packer denied knowing that she was about 26 weeks pregnant when she took the medication.
It is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors. Ms Packer told her trial: “I just felt really bad, I didn’t know I was pregnant or that far along. If I had known … I wouldn’t have done it.”
She took the foetus to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in west London and initially did not tell staff she had taken abortion medication, fearing that it would affect her treatment.
Her barrister, Fiona Horlick KC, said her client was still “utterly traumatised” by the ordeal. “The facts of this case are a tragedy but they are not a crime,” Ms Horlick said. Ms Packer told the BBC: “I did say that I’d had a late miscarriage – because I was really scared to tell them I had taken abortion pills. I didn’t know if they were going to help me get the medical support I needed.”
She eventually told a senior midwife that she had taken the abortion medication. The midwife then called the police. Prosecutors exercise “the greatest care when considering these complex and traumatic cases”, a CPS spokesperson said.
“Our role was not to decide whether Nicola Packer’s actions were right or wrong; but to make a factual judgement about whether she knew she was beyond the legal limit when she accessed abortion medication.”