I write this post in the wake of the sentencing of Carla Foster, a British woman in her own right and mother of three, to 28 months’ imprisonment for inducing an abortion later than the legal gestational limit.
It is clear even through the unsympathetic tone of the sentencing remarks that Foster was desperate. In the middle of the strictest lockdown, when access to medical services was rare and difficult for non-COVID, non-emergent situations, she became pregnant for the fourth time, and panicked. The judge highlights her internet searches, increasingly stressed. The clock ticked. The legal limit of 24 weeks approached. Foster kept asking questions. “”[H]ow to hide a pregnancy bump”, “how to have an abortion without going to the doctor” and “how to lose a baby at six months”.” No-one was there to answer. She was living with her estranged partner and pregnant by another man. She was alone with the internet and the internet told her what to do.
In her frantic state, she phoned BPAS and lied about her pregnancy. She obtained abortifacient medication, mifepristone and misoprostol. She took the meds and miscarried – a stillbirth. She named the baby Lily. She lied again to the paramedics and midwife. Then she realised she needed to talk to the police. Now she is in prison.
I am horrified by this case and by its ramifications. Foster has three living children, one of whom has special needs. She will serve at least fourteen months. Those children are without one of their parents for over a year. The intimate details of a woman’s life are scattered across the world on the global news. Private medical decisions and personal anguish broadcast. Desperation, punished.
What I am most haunted by, though, is the surveillance of Foster’s internet searches. The internet can be a refuge or a last resort. When Foster asked Google how to abort a pregnancy at an advanced stage, one imagines that it was because she had no-one else to ask. She seemed to realise the gravity of her situation and the potential illegality of her actions. But she confided in the all-knowing internet, not in people, with an expectation of privacy and maybe a faint hope of an answer.
The law is a blunt instrument. We know this. Despite our tendency to anthropomorphise, we know that the law does not have feelings and cannot manifest compassion. The humanity of the law, if there is any, comes in its application. There was no such compassion shown here. The law stretched its tendrils into the private life of Carla Foster and exposed her to the world. The people involved in implementing the law applied it straight and true. The law is a blunt instrument.
This is not a post about the legalities of the Foster case. Nor is it a post about the morality of late abortion. This is a post about how criminalisation of a person’s intimate decisions and thoughts affects not only the person themselves, but all of us. This is a post about digital surveillance of the embodied mind. It’s about what it means to be a mind and have a body, or have a mind and be a body. It’s about autonomy and freedoms and how legal regulation closes those down like a steel trap with temporal boundaries on bodily processes. It’s about a woman, and a foetus, and the law.
Abortion is one of the most personal decisions a person can make. To allow another entity to grow inside you, or to stop that growth, is a decision taken at one’s very core. It is a decision of fullness and emptiness, obligation and freedom. The criminalisation of abortion in law is a relic of a time where women and pregnant people were not seen as having autonomy over their own embodiment. We think we are more enlightened now, and yet Carla Foster is in prison. We think we are free, and yet the law says otherwise. We think we can express our thoughts into the void of the internet, and yet the law will bring them back and lay them out for the world.
This post is a vent for feelings, really. There are half-formed thoughts in here which may make it to a paper someday. I am writing because I am sad. I am sad for Carla and her family, and I am sad for the pregnant people of Britain and Ireland and everywhere else where full decriminalisation of abortion has not happened yet. I am a lawyer, and the law feels alien to me today. I grapple with systems which I try to use for good and still I am reminded of the brute force of law on the lives of vulnerable people. And I am thinking of Carla, typing, seeking, begging.
I am sending these words out into the internet, for better or worse.
Sandra Duffy 