'I was right to be frightened' Nicola Packer on trauma of her trial for illegal abortion

Nicola Packer on trauma of her trial for illegal abortion

- Hannah Al-Othman

"I hate sitting in silence now," Nikki Packer says. A quiet room reminds her too much of the police cell she was taken to and locked in just hours after undergoing a traumatic stillbirth.

Arrested in hospital by uniformed officers while still recovering from surgery, she was accused of carrying out an illegal abortion. It took four and a half years for her case to come to court, where last week she was unanimously cleared by a jury.

Packer, 46, was charged with "unlawfully administering to herself a poison or other noxious thing" with the "intent to procure a miscarriage" after taking abortion pills prescribed to her by a registered provider during the November 2020 Covid lockdown.

Under emergency legislation introduced during the pandemic and later made permanent, medication could be dispatched by post for pregnancies up to 10 weeks gestation.

Packer went on to deliver a foetus estimated to be about 26 weeks gestation. The prosecution claimed she had known she was more than 10 weeks pregnant when she took the pills, an allegation Packer had always denied.

She may have been found not guilty, but Packer knows she will never be the same. She is nervous about seeking medical help now.

At her trial, the prosecution tried to claim she was lying when she said she didn't initially tell medical staff, who went on to call in police, that she had taken abortion pills because she was afraid it would affect the quality of care she received. "But they didn't really help me, did they?" she said. "So I think I was right to be frightened."

And she no longer trusts the police. When her phone died and she needed help, she asked a drunk man outside a London station for directions, rather than the police officer.