Earlier this month, Carla Foster was released from prison after the UK Court of Appeal reduced her sentence from a 28-month custodial term to a 14-month suspended sentence. The 44-year-old mother of three, who hails from the Staffordshire village of Barlaston, had procured abortion pills by mail in May 2020 after a phone consultation with the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest private abortion chain. At that point, she was eight months pregnant. She took the pills anyway, and on May 11 she went into labour and delivered a stillborn little girl. Lily Foster, according to the prosecution, never took a breath outside the womb.
The abortion limit in the UK is 24 weeks—weeks after the child in the womb is viable outside the womb. Lily Foster was a healthy, fully developed child, and yet the fact that her mother was prosecuted for killing her with pills triggered furious protests from abortion activists. Lily’s age, gender, or the pain she suffered in the womb did not matter to the feminists—all that mattered is that Foster was convicted in Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court “for administering drugs or using instruments to procure an abortion.”
Abortion activists marched in protest with signs reading “Our bodies Our right to decide” and “Abortion is healthcare, not a crime” and “Healthcare not handcuffs.” The body of the little girl was ignored; Lily’s murder, according to these activists, is “healthcare.”
For commentary on this case, I reached out to Dr. Calum Miller, an ethicist, philosopher, and practicing medical doctor who graduated from the University of Oxford Medical School in 2015. He teaches philosophy at Oxford, where his research focuses on abortion policy in practice. He has debated the CEO of BPAS several times, published on abortion in top academic journals, and received awards from Oxford and the Royal College of Psychiatrists for his work on bioethics. He is also one of the UK’s most articulate defenders of unborn children, as pro-abortion hosts on the BBC have discovered to their great chagrin.
What details of this story are being ignored or twisted by the press?
The most striking thing left out of these conversations is, of course, that this baby was aborted at 8 months, and very clearly not for any medical reasons, nor because the child had any disability. This is an inconvenient fact for those who say that late-term abortions only ever take place for those sorts of reasons—it’s simply not true. The other fact that is less acknowledged is that this prosecution, and others like it that are going through the courts, are only possible because the abortion providers have been recklessly and dangerously sending out abortion pills in the mail without properly verifying women’s gestational age, thus subjecting women not only to serious medical risks but even to serious legal risks as well. Of course, the abortion providers don’t care too much because it’s the women who will be facing jail sentences, not them. But it’s chilling that, rather than taking accountability for this, they are using these cases as excuses to push for abortion to be legal up to birth.
What has the political impact of this story and sentencing been?
The original story broke primarily because the abortion activists wanted to use it to push for abortion up to birth for any reason. Without that motivation and effort we might never have known about it. But it seems to have backfired in this case, because the average person in the UK was horrified to hear that an abortion took place at 8 months—and not only do most people think it should be illegal, most people actually appeared to support a jail sentence for Carla Foster, the mother in this story. Many people calling into radio stations, and many news hosts, were themselves blaming the abortion provider for recklessly sending these pills out—signs that the public are beginning to realise just how awful a policy it was to bring in abortion pills by post, without ever seeing a healthcare professional in person.
Is this sentence just, in your opinion?
It’s honestly hard to tell without knowing all the information. Sentencing is a profoundly tricky subject for many reasons, and that’s why it tends to be highly qualified judges who do this rather than amateurs who don’t have all the information about the case, like me. Lily Foster was clearly a fully developed baby, and her mother Carla knew this, and killed her. So obviously there is a significant degree of guilt, and I think the pro-life movement sometimes deceives itself when it implies that people obtaining abortions never have any culpability. But on the other hand, the nature of the act is only one thing that goes into sentencing: we also have to take into account motivations, mental illness, remorse, risk to the community, other dependent children, and so on. I don’t know those details in this case, so it would be pointless for me to speculate about exactly what the sentence should have been.
In your medical opinion, what effect would the abortion pills have had on the unborn baby?
Lily Foster was about 8 months old, so if she were born at that very moment she would almost certainly have survived. This was a fully developed baby—babies much younger have been born and survived outside of the womb. She could have felt pain, all her bodily organs were there, she was just like you would expect a newborn baby to be. It’s a bit controversial as to what exactly would have killed her in this situation. In a way it was actually less brutal than typical abortion procedures at this stage—normally in an 8-month abortion you would perform feticide, stabbing the baby in the heart with a high dose of potassium chloride, a drug which can’t be used in high concentrations on death row or for putting down animals because it is considered torture to do so. So when doctors do these abortions it is significantly worse still.
How should pro-lifers respond to cases like this?
I think with a dose of humility. Although what Carla Foster did was really evil, we don’t know exactly what was going through her mind, nor do we know how much she regrets it—she says she was plagued by flashbacks of her dead baby’s face and apparently showed significant remorse, though we don’t know the details of this. At the same time, it shows the importance of continually demonstrating the facts: that late-term abortions are not only done for medical emergencies or fatal disabilities, but sometimes they are done by healthy women on healthy babies, even if rarely. ‘Compassion’ has been the word thrown around most in this debate, without any real explanation of what that means or why we should have it. If Carla Foster really is remorseful for what she has done, then pro-lifers should of course feel compassion for her and hope that she can receive healing and forgiveness, and hopefully even become an advocate for life in time. But at the same time, we have to feel compassion for baby Lily, who was slaughtered and who the law counts as close to nothing. We have a lot of work still to do.
