FOI 20323-25 - Illegal Abortion Investigations
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
3. 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
4. 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:
Searches were conducted within Northamptonshire Police up to 27th October 2025 and no information was found relevant to your request. Therefore, I can confirm that Northamptonshire Police do not hold the requested information.
Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom of Information responses.
If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we 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 response.