A couple in the United Kingdom has been arrested for poisoning their preborn baby and then dumping the baby’s body.
Elliot Benham and Sophie Harvey allegedly committed the crime sometime between September 1 and December 1 of 2018. Though several years have passed, both were arrested and charged with “procuring a poison/noxious thing to cause a miscarriage,” concealing the birth of a child, and disposing of a baby’s body.
The charges have been authorized by the Crown Prosecution Service, with both charged with violating the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. This law states that it is illegal to cause your own abortion, and Harvey’s abortion was not committed by a doctor. Harvey was said to be more than 24 weeks pregnant at the time that the baby was killed. Both Benham and Harvey have been released on bail.
Abortion in the UK is illegal after 24 weeks except when a preborn child has been diagnosed with a disability or birth defect.
One pro-life campaigner in the UK has been fighting to have this discriminatory 24-week abortion law overturned, but recently lost in a court of appeals. The United Kingdom has also forcibly imposed abortion upon Northern Ireland, a previously pro-life territory, and enacted anti-free speech buffer zones around abortion facilities.
Most recently, a woman was arrested in England simply for silently praying near an abortion facility in Kings Norton, Birmingham. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was not carrying any signs or speaking to anyone, but because she was believed to be praying silently in her mind, she was arrested and charged with a crime. She was even initially banned from contacting a local Catholic priest as one of her conditions for bail, although that was eventually dropped.
At this time, it is unclear why Benham and Harvey chose to kill their preborn child, or why they chose to do so themselves despite living in a country that makes abortion so easy to obtain.
