Medical staff in the UK should not report women to the police if they believe their patients may have illegally ended their own pregnancy, a professional body has said.
The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has said it is never in the public interest to report women who have abortions to law enforcement agencies, according to the BBC.
Patients’ data cannot be disclosed without their consent by law. Healthcare workers can breach confidentiality rules to give information to the police about possible crimes only if it is deemed to be in the public interest.
Since 2022, at least six women have been taken to court and dozens have been investigated for allegedly ending their pregnancy outside the legal requirements covering abortion. In the previous 20 years, three women were prosecuted.
Abortions in England must be performed by a registered medical practitioner and take place within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. Otherwise, it is illegal to deliberately end a pregnancy and, under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, it carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.
The RCOG said it was concerned at the increase in the number of prosecutions involving “deeply traumatised” and vulnerable women.
In its official guidance, it said healthcare workers must justify any disclosure of patient data or “face potential fitness-to-practice proceedings”.
Jonathan Lord, the RCOG’s medical director, told the BBC: “A law that was originally designed to protect a woman is now being used against her.
“We have witnessed life-changing harm to women and their wider families as a direct result of NHS staff reporting women suspected of crimes, and we just don’t think that would happen in other areas of healthcare.
“We deal with the most vulnerable groups who may be concerned about turning to regulated healthcare at all, and we need them to trust us.”
Lord said the college’s main concern was over the sharp rise in the number of women being investigated. He said: “Although the numbers are hard to tease out, at the very tip of the iceberg are those who end up in court …
“And for everyone who ends up in court, there’s a much greater number who are investigated, and it’s those investigations that really caused the harm to women and their families.
“It’s also just so deeply traumatic if you suffered a pregnancy loss or a natural miscarriage, whether it was from abortion care or whether it was just a natural thing, to then face suspicion and investigation, and know that your name could be very public and you could go to jail, is just deeply distressing.”
Lord said he believed some NHS staff had shared information with police because they were ignorant about confidentiality regulations, and the new guidance was intended to remind them of their obligations.
Many women who had been investigated had in fact had late miscarriages, or had been later in their pregnancy than they had realised when they had had terminations, he said.
Recent prosecutions include that of Carla Foster, who was jailed for procuring her own abortion in 2020. She was released from prison last year after an appeal. Bethany Cox, from Teesside, was cleared of the same charge earlier this month. Three more women accused of illegal abortions are due to appear in court this year.
The Crown Prosecution Service told the BBC such cases were rare and addressed sensitively but it had a duty to ensure the law was followed.
British Pregnancy Advisory Service and other women’s rights campaigners have long argued that women who end a pregnancy after the legal limit are in crisis, and that abortion should be regulated but decriminalised. They argue that the rest of the UK is out of step with Northern Ireland, where a 2019 law legalising abortion put a moratorium on abortion-related criminal prosecutions.
