Illegally ending pregnancies (FOI ref: 2203A/25)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am writing to request the total number of criminal investigations opened by your police force into women on suspicion of illegally ending a pregnancy in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date).
Please:
1. Provide separate figures for each specific year, and another for all the years combined
2. Break down the figures into 'no further action' OR 'charge made' OR 'investigation ongoing' where possible
- Do not include more than one entry where the same individual has been criminally investigated more than once on suspicion of illegally ending their pregnancy
- Take 'illegally ending a pregnancy' as anything listed in the Notifiable Offences List under the following categories:
- 014/01 Procuring an illegal abortion - Administering drugs or using instruments to procure abortion
- 004/03 Child destruction - Intentional destruction of a viable unborn child
- From the above offences, please only include investigations where the woman who is / was pregnant is the suspect.
Response
Please see as follows, but note – due to system changes/issues, data is currently not retrievable prior to April 2021 and therefore we are unable to provide it at this time:
1. Provide separate figures for each specific year, and another for all the years combined
|
Year |
Total |
|
2021* |
1 |
|
2022 |
3 |
|
2023 |
0 |
|
2024 |
2 |
|
2025 |
2 |
|
Grand Total |
8 |
* Data for 2021 is partial year from 01 April
2. Break down the figures into 'no further action' OR 'charge made' OR 'investigation ongoing' where possible
|
Outcome |
2021* |
2022 |
2023 |
2024 |
2025 |
Total |
|
Pending Outcome |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
1 |
|
Further action will be taken by another body |
0 |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
1 |
|
Named Suspect identified: evidential difficulties prevent further action |
1 |
3 |
0 |
1 |
1 |
6 |
|
Grand Total |
1 |
3 |
0 |
2 |
2 |
8 |
* Data for 2021 is partial year from 01 April
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that this data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request may be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of data which has relevance to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.