During the Covid-19 pandemic, a 44-year-old woman, Carla Foster, unlawfully aborted her unborn baby. She procured the necessary drugs from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) by leading them to believe her pregnancy was just over seven weeks in. In fact, she understood herself to be either 28 or 30 weeks in gestation. A post-mortem on her otherwise healthy baby girl, Lily, indicated the pregnancy was somewhere between 32 and 34 weeks.
The Abortion Act 1967, as amended in 1990, sets 24 weeks as the upper time limit for lawfully obtaining an abortion in Great Britain, with exceptions where the woman is at risk of death or significant harm, or where serious foetal abnormalities are detected. However, the mifepristone-misoprostol combination Foster acquired is limited to use in the first ten weeks of pregnancy. As such, she was charged with child destruction, though eventually offered to plead guilty to an offence of administering poison with intent to procure a miscarriage.
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