‘I hate sitting in silence now’: Nicola Packer on clearing her title after the trauma of her unlawful abortion trial

“I hate sitting in silence now,” Nikki Packer says. A quiet room reminds her an excessive amount of of the police mobile she used to be taken to and locked into simply hours after present process a demanding stillbirth.

Arrested in medical institution via uniformed officials, whilst nonetheless convalescing from surgical procedure, she used to be accused of sporting out an unlawful abortion. It took four-and-a-half years for her case to come back to court docket, the place closing week she used to be unanimously cleared via a jury.

Packer, 45, used to be charged with “unlawfully administering to herself a poison or other noxious thing” with the “intent to procure a miscarriage”, after taking abortion tablets prescribed to her via a registered supplier right through the November 2020 Covid lockdown.

Under emergency regulation offered right through the pandemic – and later made everlasting – drugs may well be dispatched via submit for pregnancies as much as 10 weeks’ gestation.

Packer went directly to ship a foetus estimated to be round 26 weeks’ gestation. The prosecution had claimed she had recognized she used to be greater than 10 weeks’ pregnant when she took the tablets; an allegation Packer had all the time denied.

She will have been discovered no longer to blame, however Packer is aware of she is going to by no means be the similar; she is worried of looking for scientific lend a hand now.

At her trial, the prosecution attempted to assert she used to be mendacity when she stated she didn’t first of all inform scientific group of workers (who went on to name in police) that she had taken abortion tablets as a result of she used to be afraid it could impact the standard of care she won.

“But they didn’t really help me, did they?” she says. “So I think I was right to be frightened.”

And she now not trusts the police – when her telephone died, and she or he wanted lend a hand, she requested the inebriated guy out of doors a London station for instructions, moderately than the police officer.

She additionally is aware of she has no longer but totally processed the enormity of what came about to her. Just days after the decision, “I’m still running on adrenaline,” she says. But she is looking for solutions from the Crown Prosecution Service and the Met police as to how she were given right here.

“There are other ways that it could have been handled after I’d been in hospital,” she says. “I could have been sent home to recuperate. There was no legal need for me to be taken straight to a police station.”

“It was absolutely horrific to get to from the hospital to Charing Cross police station,” she added. With no vehicles to be had, she used to be put behind the police van, and “I had to sit basically on a plank of wood, with no seat belts on it, driving around London like that.”. In custody, she used to be no longer given her anti-clotting drugs on time, instructed it used to be “not a priority”.

“I was still in pain, I was extremely tired, I felt very weak and mentally, just did not really understand what was going on,” she stated.

The prosecution clouded her lifestyles for nearly 1/2 a decade. “I kept doing things, but you’re not fully present in the moment,” she says.

She spent tens of hundreds of kilos on her defence. A crowdfunder helped to fulfill no less than a few of her prices. “I read all [the comments] several times,” she says. “I was reading them in the run up and during the trial as well. There are so many people out there that don’t believe this should be happening, there’s so much support.”

Years sooner than her case ever reached Isleworth crown court docket, Packer’s barrister, Fiona Horlick KC, requested her what she used to be maximum of scared of.

“I’m most scared going to prison,” she says. The subsequent worst factor, used to be “the trial, just giving evidence and having to be speaking in front of all these people”.

She knew she had the approach to plead to blame, however she didn’t imagine it for greater than a “split second,” she says. “I couldn’t have looked at myself doing that, because it wasn’t true.”

While she waited for her case to come back to court docket, she noticed every other lady, Carla Foster, convicted of, and jailed for, an unlawful abortion, sooner than her sentence used to be suspended via the enchantment court docket.

“I was really angry, angry that she had to go through this,” Packer says. “She spent 35 days in prison. Why? Who did that help? What was the point? There was no point in sending her to prison, and then you have to think about the impact on the rest of her life.”

But the case additionally introduced house the truth of what she herself used to be going through, and she or he started asking herself questions she had by no means imagined having to consider. “How do I prepare for the worst outcome?” she says. “Do I rent my flat out and cancel Netflix? What do I do? I don’t know. I’ve never been in this situation before.”

“The rational part of your brain can tell you it’s unlikely to happen, but then the other part … it still could happen,” ” she provides. “So it’s a horrible thing to live under, and the fact that it comes with a potential life [sentence] in prison.”

When Packer’s trial in spite of everything came visiting on the finish of April, the prosecution opening together with main points of her intercourse lifestyles, which incorporated her being a part of BDSM communities.

“It was completely unnecessary, and it was just done to make me look bad,” she says. “And potentially you’re dealing with something that people may never have heard of, wouldn’t understand, may have a bad opinion of. It was completely not needed.”

At one level, Packer used to be pressured to take a seat in court docket whilst legal professionals mentioned the dimensions of her nipples with the pass judgement on. Intimate images of her have been proven to the jury; proof of her flat abdomen.

“It was quite humiliating,” she says,. “I didn’t want anybody to see those photos, but I knew that it was for my own good.

“We hid what we could, but because my nipples were such a hot topic, we couldn’t blank them out in pictures,” she says. “It’s not nice knowing that people have seen such intimate pictures of you.”

“It was horrendous giving evidence, absolutely awful,” she says. “It was very upsetting, I spent most of the time crying while I was doing it, but I got through it because I knew that I was right.”

And the jury agreed, discovering her no longer to blame after round six hours of deliberations.

“It was just wonderful to get that verdict,” she stated. “I just feel that although the last four and a half years been absolutely horrific, I don’t know if I could say at the moment it was worth it, but to have that validation of being found unanimously not guilty by a jury of my peers, it’s an amazing thing.”

Having cleared her title, Packer is now throwing her weight at the back of the voices calling for a metamorphosis within the legislation that might see abortion decriminalised. A parliamentary vote is predicted at the factor as early as this summer time.

“I do hope that the law does get changed – it should do,” she stated. “Abortion is healthcare. It should not be treated as anything other than that.”

“We recognise the profound strength of feeling these cases evoke, but have a duty to apply laws passed by parliament fairly and impartially,” a CPS spokesperson stated.

“This could happen to anybody, I think that’s what’s really scary about it,” Packer says. “With the law being as it is, a tragic accident and you’re up on trial, and it’s why the law needs to change.”

Packer needs to make historical past because the closing lady in England to be prosecuted for an abortion. She has heard of alternative ladies whose instances are within the prison justice machine, at previous phases – and she or he needs to make use of her voice to make sure they by no means see the interior of a court docket.

“I can’t really say it was worth it,” she says, “but at least it would have meant something.”

Aside from campaigning for legislative trade, how does Packer plan to transport on from this? “That is a very good question,” she says. “I do feel a bit like I need to find myself again.”

While looking forward to trial, she sought convenience in acquainted tune and tv; she listened to the similar albums from her favorite rock artists on repeat, rewatched her favorite collection’ back-to-back. But she discovered she may now not watch Orange Is The New Black.

“I had to turn it off,” she says. “I couldn’t watch it any more because I started to get a really eerie feeling; this is set in a prison, I might go to a prison.”

But, she provides: “I started re-watching it last night.”