UK mom Carla Foster jailed for aborting baby at 8 months

A British mom of three was sentenced to more than two years in prison for aborting a baby while about eight months pregnant.

Carla Foster, 44, was terrified her estranged partner would find out she became pregnant while seeing two other men in late 2019, according to a court report by StokeOnTrentLive.

She repeatedly lied to get abortion pills that were only available online due to loosened restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court was told.

The pills were only for women in their first weeks of pregnancy — but Foster was between 32 and 34 weeks, way beyond the UK’s 24-week limit for abortions, her trial heard. 

She made numerous internet searches about “How to not look pregnant” and “How to hide the pregnancy bump” — as well as “If you get hit in the belly will you lose your baby?,” the local outlet noted.

Foster lied to a pregnancy adviser that she was only seven weeks pregnant — despite searching: “I need to have an abortion but I’m past 24 weeks.”

Prosecutor Robert Price said that “multiple and prolonged internet searches showed a level of planning.”

“While the baby was not full term, she was approaching that stage of development,” Price said, noting that the baby’s body was never found.

Justice Edward Pepperall credited Foster for being otherwise a “good mother to three children,” including one with special needs, while telling her that she that could have avoided prison if she had pleaded guilty sooner in the “tragic” and “very rare” case.

Instead, he sentenced her to 28 months in prison — with the chance to be freed on the UK equivalent of probation after serving half — in part to “reinforce the limit of [the] law.” 

“I accept that you feel very deep and genuine remorse for your actions. You are wracked by guilt and have suffered depression,” the judge noted during sentencing.

“I also accept that you had a very deep emotional attachment to your unborn child and that you are plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to seeing your dead child’s face.”

The judge ripped an “inappropriate” letter from professional organizations representing obstetricians, gynecologists and midwives lobbying him not to send the mom behind bars.

“My duty as a judge is to apply the law as provided by parliament,” Pepperall told the court.

“If the medical profession considers that judges are wrong to imprison women who procure a late abortion outside the 24-week limit then it should lobby parliament to change that law, and not judges who are charged with the duty of applying the law.”

Numerous politicians later said it was time to do just that.

Caroline Nokes, chair of the women and equalities select committee, told the BBC that the 1861 law used to prosecute Foster was “out of date”.

The “thankfully very rare” case proved it was “time for parliament to start looking at this issue in detail” and “decide in the 21st Century whether we should be relying on legislation that is centuries old,” she said.

Mandu Reid, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, also said that “Nothing about this conviction serves the public interest, or the interests of [Foster] and her children. 

“This case is a damning indictment of abortion law in England,” Reid said.

“It also reveals the indefensible, ugly truth about the criminalization of abortion. Opposition to abortion has never been about what’s best for children or women.”

However, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, which opposes abortion, criticized providers for “pushing for dangerous home abortions,” and said women such as Foster were “left to self-administer these drugs alone with no medical supervision or support.”

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said criminalizing abortion was proper in the right circumstances.

“Our laws as they stand balance a woman’s right to access safe and legal abortions with the rights of an unborn child,” spokesperson Max Blain said. “I’m not aware of any plans to address that approach.”

With Post wires