Prosecutors have offered no evidence against a woman accused of using drugs to bring about an illegal abortion as the first UK coronavirus lockdown ended.
Bethany Cox, 22, was on Tuesday formally found not guilty of charges that had been brought under a Victorian law condemned as cruel and outdated by campaigners – the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.
Nicholas Lumley KC, the barrister representing Cox, said it was “an extraordinary state of affairs”. He said his client had been interviewed by police in the “throes of grief” and had been investigated for three years.
Cox, from Eaglescliffe, Stockton, was not in court to hear her formal acquittal. “The reason Bethany Cox does not want to be here is that she has suffered so extensively over this prosecution and investigation, all the while grieving what took place,” said Lumley.
Sitting at Teesside crown court, Judge Paul Watson, the recorder of Middlesbrough, formally found Cox not guilty of two charges relating to an illegal abortion.
Cox pleaded not guilty to the charges last August. On Tuesday the court heard there had been a hearing on 19 December before Mrs Justice Lambert, the presiding judge of the north-eastern circuit, at which she asked the prosecution to revisit details of the case.
Jolyon Perks, for the prosecution, said the case had been discussed at the highest level of the Crown Prosecution Service and evidential difficulties had led to a decision not to pursue the charges.
He said the prosecution was “not in possession of key evidence” and there was “no real prospect of conviction”.
The evidential difficulties were not disclosed.
Lumley said the difficulties had been there from the beginning.
“These issues echo what she told the police and evidential difficulties have always been there,” he said. “The prosecution now accept what she said to the police must have been right and that is beyond regrettable.”
Rachael Clarke, the chief of staff at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), said the prosecution should never have reached this point.
She said: “We welcome the withdrawal of charges against a young woman in Teesside, and are delighted that this case will not proceed to an unnecessary and gruelling trial. We hope that she can now begin to move on from this lengthy and no doubt emotional ordeal.
“However this case should never have got to this point … As it stands, England and Wales have the most severe punishment for an illegal abortion in the world – up to life imprisonment. This is worse than countries and states with severe anti-abortion laws such as Texas, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. We are on the wrong side of history.”
Clarke said BPAS was working with the MP Dame Diana Johnson on an amendment to the criminal justice bill covering the law relating to abortion.
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“We are calling on MPs to do the right thing and support the amendment,” she said.
Campaigners and legal experts last year warned there were increasing numbers of women being prosecuted over abortion.
The cases of five women, including Cox, came to court in 2023. They included Carla Foster, who was jailed before having her sentence reduced by the court of appeal.
She had admitted illegally procuring her own abortion when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant and was jailed at Stoke-on-Trent crown court for 28 months. Her sentence was reduced to 14 months suspended by three appeal court judges including Dame Victoria Sharp, who said: “It is a case that calls for compassion, not punishment.”
The original charges Cox faced were: “On 06/07/2020 at Stockton, with intent to destroy the life of a child capable of being born alive, by a wilful act, namely administering drugs to procure abortion, contrary to section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, caused the child to die before it had an existence independent of its mother.”
The second charge read: “Between 02/07/2020 and 07/07/2020 at Stockton, being a woman with child, unlawfully administered to yourself a poison or other noxious thing, with intent to procure your own miscarriage.”