Author Archives: Janey Little and Eleanor Kelly

Stillbirth surveillance is the next chapter of our dystopian and dangerous abortion laws. Our parliaments must legislate to decriminalise.

We were chilled to read about the new stillbirth surveillance guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC). This NPCC guidance on “child death investigations” includes the seizure of mobile phones and accessing data from menstrual tracking apps in order to understand people’s “intentions” with the pregnancy. You would think this was a news story in Trump’s America, not right on our doorstep.

This development is part of a wider picture: one of an incremental and dystopian attack on women’s rights, both at home and across the globe. Anti-abortion activism in the UK is on the rise, with the UK branch of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) receiving over £1.1 million in 2024 from the US parent body. Last year, Nigel Farage said that rolling back the 24-week abortion limit was “worthy of a debate in parliament”. Meanwhile, misogyny is increasingly becoming mainstream globally, while nearly a quarter of governments reported backlash on gender equality in 2024.

Reform to abortion law in England and Wales is long overdue. Currently, abortion is a criminal offence under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, unless it is carried out according to the requirements of the Abortion Act 1967. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen an increase in police suspicion with dozens of investigations and six women in England charged in the past two years alone. 

In 2021, a 15-year-old girl was investigated for a year for an unexplained stillbirth, which was dropped after they concluded that it was due to natural causes. In 2024, a case against Bethany Cox was dropped after a three-year investigation where she was charged with abortion as a teenager. A psychiatric examination found that this had a “profound” impact on Cox. Mothers have been prevented from caring for their children.

People who are already suffering from trauma relating to stillbirth, miscarriage, and the ending of a pregnancy have been subjected to lengthy invasive investigations and emotional turmoil, while stripped of their support network at a time of vulnerability. Women denied access to their premature babies, their devices seized by police, having to hand over breastmilk to hospital receptionists because they previously considered an abortion. This cannot go on.