Woman who faced life imprisonment for abortion cleared by English jury

Nicola Packer went through an intrusive four-year investigation and prosecution that stigmatized her sexual life and questioned her morals.

(Nicola Packer)

As Nicola Packer sat in a London courtroom last week, she anxiously awaited the verdict that would determine whether she could potentially spend her life in prison for taking abortion medication.

She felt sick and her heart went into her stomach. It had been a moment four years in the making. The clerk stood up, and the head juror said they found the defendant not guilty. She burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for a while.

“Four and a half years is a long time,” Packer told me.. “There needs to be some kind of limit on when you can bring something to trial. When somebody has gone through such a huge trauma, you should not be bringing it out and making it worse. The trial itself was absolutely awful.”

Packer, 45, discussed her four-and-a-half-year ordeal, including the trial for abortion, which she believes should be decriminalized. She highlighted the trauma of reliving past events and the intrusive testimony about her personal life.

Packer criticized the prosecution's use of irrelevant medical claims and the media's sensationalism. She recounted her arrest at a hospital, the subsequent police custody, and the legal process, including the potential for a life sentence. Despite the ordeal, she expressed relief at the "not guilty" verdict and plans to advocate for abortion decriminalization in the U.K.

Because of the way the law is written, English women who get abortions may face a life sentence if the pregnancy ends at a later point than when the law allows. Packer had gotten a prescription for abortion medication during the COVID-19 pandemic and didn’t realize how far along she was.

At question was an 1861 law known as the Offenses Against the Persons Act, which calls for life imprisonment for some people who perform abortions illegally.

Another relevant law passed in 1923 that was called the Infant Life Preservation Act. That prevents abortions past the point of viability. Between 1861 and 2018, there were only three prosecutions of women, though there were more for back-alley providers. But after 2018, there have been six. Police have performed drug tests on women suspected of using mifepristone and misoprostol.

That has to do with women taking mifepristone and misoprostol. Some activists in the country have pushed for the decriminalization of medication abortion, as I reported before.

Some of the history of British abortion jurisprudence is worth exploring. Criminal abortion, much like in America, was done in back alley settings, much like in America. It wasn’t until the 1930s, with the formation of the Abortion Law Reform Association, that feminists and doctors began pushing for liberalization of the laws. At the time, some, like British birth control pioneer Marie Stopes–who is to England what Margaret Sanger is to America–hadn’t wanted to focus on abortion. But pioneering feminists like Stella Browne and Janet Chance did.

Their chance to bring the issue to national attention came in 1938 with the case of Rex v. Bourne. Dr. Aleck Bourne, an OB/GYN, performed an abortion on a 14-year-old rape victim. It arose from the brutal sexual assault of Nellie Hales, who lived in London with her parents, Horace, and her mother, who was also named Nellie. Three royal guardsmen at the Horse Guards in London lured her into a stall where they raped her repeatedly. Afterward, her mother took her to a Catholic hospital where a doctor told them that he wouldn’t perform an abortion because the baby could be a future prime minister. English law called for adoption in situations where rape led to pregnancy.

Later, the mother wrote a letter to Joan Malleson, who worked at St. Mary’s Hospital and was a member of the Abortion Law Reform Association. In turn, she contacted Bourne, who agreed to perform an abortion. When I spoke to Bourne’s grandson, he told me that his grandfather had wanted to take the abortion business away from midwives. The association wanted a sympathetic test case. It went before a jury at Old Bailey, the most famous courthouse in the world. The jury acquitted him on the same day it deliberated. I adapted this for both a play and a screenplay.

That galvanized the abortion rights movement all over the world. And it’s what eventually led to the 1967 liberalization in England. The 1967 reforms led to English law permitting abortions when a continued pregnancy will cause significant harm to a woman’s well-being. It also can’t be past the 24th week.

Important things to note about the reforms that came in the 1960s. They stipulated that the abortions had to be done in hospital settings or approved medical clinics. The design of that law was to ensure that women were getting the safest possible care and not entering dangerous back alley environments. It wasn’t designed with abortion medication in mind, much like the Supreme Court precedence after Roe.

That medical option didn’t arrive until the 1990s with RU-486. The laws in England are woefully behind the times insofar as addressing abortion care as it currently exists, with the majority of women opting for medication instead of surgical procedures.

When she went to the hospital following complications, hospital staff reported her to authorities, who then arrested her and took her into a police van to drive to Charing Cross Police Station, where she was interrogated and held for 24 hours.

Packer broke down in tears when her solicitor told her that she could face a life sentence.

“Even though they were saying, ‘It's incredibly unlikely. We don't think you'll even go to prison. And if you do, it won't be for a very long time…,”

“Any second spent in prison is too long.”

Though Packer didn’t accrue any legal debt because the potential father paid the fees, the $60,000 paid and another $100,000 for which she got legal aid still amounted to $60,000. If another person had paid the fees, they would have been paid out of pocket. So that’s scary, given that this prosecution could happen with other people.

That’s what Jonathan Lord, co-chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists abortion taskforce, told me could occur if the law isn’t changed.

The number of reported abortion crimes from 2018 and before was almost zero. The crimes were seldom investigated. Nicola was the first one she was involved with. It began an upward trend of abortion prosecutions and investigations.

Lord said the case was deeply shocking to the country.

“It sort of rocked our confidence in the whole criminal justice system, quite frankly,” Lord said.

“The tactics that they used were utterly outrageous, because they basically just sort of tried to destroy her character in any way they could.”

Public reaction was strong, with MPs in Parliament showing unprecedented support when the case spurred efforts to remove women from the Criminal Code. Lord expects a bill to pass by mid-June.

“Their jaws dropped. They just couldn't believe what they were hearing,” Lord said. And that was to such an extent that two of them then volunteered to take time out of their day in Parliament to go down to court, just to show that they support her. And I've never come across that before.”