The Abortion Plot: A Lyrical Critique of the Prosecutions for Suspected ‘Illegal’ Abortion in England

Abstract This poetic/critical piece offers an urgent reflection on nine criminal prosecutions for suspected ‘illegal’ abortion in England that occurred between 2012 and 2025. Drawing on published traces of the cases, including sentencing remarks, appeal decisions and media reports, this essay-meditation evokes the haunting, suffocation and cruelty imposed by the criminalisation of abortion. In paying attention to plot and the discursive violence of this particular legal framing, this piece applies creative writing methods to provoke a destabilising, denaturalising, twisting, deplotting, dismantling and undoing, in a project of reproductive justice, abolition and liberation. CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains distressing content taken directly from prosecutions and trials, including references to abortion, stillbirth, infant death, murder, domestic violence.