When a colleague called me on Saturday morning to tell me that news had broken that police were investigating the death of an unborn baby at 28 weeks following a “pill by post” abortion, I swore down the phone. Not because I dislike being called at the weekend, but because I was so angry that this had been allowed to happen.

From the second that the remote abortion policy was announced, we knew what a horrifically dangerous and awful idea it was. It was blatantly obvious (as I raged to anyone who would listen) that there was no way an unborn baby’s gestation could be accurately assessed via an online consultation with the mother. Or that any control could be exercised over who received these powerful drugs or where they were used, once the deadly pills had left the confines of a clinic.

There’s no pleasure in being right when the consequences are this appalling. A baby who could almost certainly have survived outside the womb is dead, and a woman went through the horrific ordeal of labouring to give birth to a dead baby in her own home. And all this because an abortion industry that cares nothing for women, exploited a public health crisis to push their radical abortion agenda, enabled by a Government too weak and negligent to stand up to them.

We know next to nothing about the woman at the centre of this story. Just that she was 28 weeks pregnant and lives in the Midlands. We can only speculate on what horrific combination of circumstances led her to order abortion pills so late in pregnancy and to take them. Was she being coerced? Was she genuinely unaware of how advanced her pregnancy was? Did she have a learning difficulty? Any abortion ends a human life and is traumatic for the woman, but if you were expecting “pregnancy tissue and blood clots” and instead gave birth to a fully formed, almost certainly viable, but dead baby, the mental shock would be unimaginable.

Whatever the answers to these questions, it is undisputable that her stage of pregnancy would have been recognised had she gone into a clinic. If it wasn’t immediately obvious to the naked eye (most women would have a noticeable bump at that stage), then a scan would have revealed it. And, deficient though abortion clinics are in this regard, there is at least some hope that whatever circumstances that led her to seek an abortion could have been recognised, and appropriate support provided.

Why will BPAS not take responsibilty for this appalling failure of care?

It is clear that BPAS are not taking responsibility for this appalling failure of care. Katherine O’Brien of BPAS insisted to the Sun that “The swift establishment of a telemedical early medical abortion service at the start of this crisis has been a phenomenal achievement in women’s healthcare, enabling women to safely access the care they need at home.”

She went on: “We are aware of a vanishingly small number of pregnancies which were treated beyond the ten week gestational band, with just one over 24 weeks.” Vanishingly small? Eight cases that they are aware of (or are admitting to), in the few short months that this scheme has been running seems like quite enough to be getting on with. And even if only one is over the legal limit for abortions generally, this many over what is recommended to be safe for medical abortions is atrocious. And you’ll notice she doesn’t say what gestation they actually are – 23 weeks would hardly be any better than 24.

I really hope that the mother at the centre of this story will reach out to the pro-life movement for any help and healing that she needs – it seems certain that she won’t get it from BPAS.

It’s not even clear from the story that BPAS reported these illegal abortions to the police. The article mentions a whistleblower – was it him or her that alerted the authorities? Whatever the extent of their bravery in speaking out, they displayed more sense than anyone in the Health Department has saying: “The ‘pills by post’ system has been brought in but a 40-minute phone call can never be the same as a proper medical consultation. There needs to be a proper investigation to find out just what went wrong.”

What will the human cost of remote abortions be on women?

Not only does this remote abortion policy endanger women, it obviously cheapens the value of human life. People are shocked at this story because it involves a 6 month old unborn baby. A baby that would have a 90% chance of survival if it was born at that stage. A baby who, according to the NHS, weighed 1kg, “approximately the size of a pineapple, and the weight of a big bag of brown sugar.” A baby whose heartbeat could be heard by his or her father putting his ear to the mother’s bump.

And yes, it is shocking that a baby only two months away from being born naturally could be killed this way. But is it really so surprising under a regime where a woman can literally pick up the phone, order some pills, and within a few days her baby is dead?

 What will the human cost be for women? We don’t yet know what’s happened to the woman who took abortion pills at 28 weeks. But this quote, from a woman who took the pills “properly” – early in pregnancy and having made the decision with no coercion - just hints at the toll: “It seemed like every time I turned on the news, I saw images of new mothers. They’d had their babies during a worldwide crisis, while I’d flushed mine down the loo.”