FOI 0723-2025/26- Illegally ending a pregnancy

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:

Q1. Provide separate figures for each specific year, and another for all the years combined

Q2. Break down the figures into 'no further action' OR 'charge made' OR 'investigation ongoing' where possible

Q3. 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

Q4. 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: 

Extent and Result of Searches to Locate Information

To locate the information relevant to your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police. 

I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by North Yorkshire Police. 

Decision

The information you have requested is published on the North Yorkshire Police website under the following link:

FOI 0182-2025/26 - Illegal terminations | North Yorkshire Police

I have therefore decided to exempt providing you with a response to question 1-4 pursuant to Section 21 Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act).

Section 17 of the Act requires North Yorkshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which: (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

Section 21 – Information Reasonably Accessible by Other Means

Section 21 is an absolute class based exemption and I am not required to consider the harm or public interest when applying this exemption.

Pursuant to Section 17(1) of the Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice in response to your request.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.