A WOMAN who aborted her baby within a week of the due date has been jailed for eight years. Sarah Catt, 35, ended the pregnancy because she thought the father was a man she had been having an affair with.
She bought drugs online that induced her labour when the pregnancy was nearly full term. She then claimed the boy was stillborn and that she buried his body.
But no evidence of the child was ever found, Leeds Crown Court heard.
Catt had two children with her husband when she became pregnant in 2009. The court heard she believed the baby’s father was a man with whom she had been having an affair for seven years.
She tried to terminate the pregnancy in 2010 but discovered she had missed the legal limit of 24 weeks.
She made several searches on the internet relating to illegal abortions and abortion drugs, including “Where can I get an illegal abortion?” and “Inducing an abortion at 30 weeks”. Catt, from Sherburn-in-Elmet, North Yorks, bought a drug used to terminate pregnancy or induce labour over the internet from a company in Mumbai, India, in May 2010.
The drug was delivered to her home address when she was 38 weeks pregnant and she is believed to have taken it towards the end of May 2010 when she had been carrying the baby for nearly 40 weeks.
Catt was arrested in September 2010 and was interviewed several times over the next year. She told police she had undergone a legal abortion at a Marie Stopes clinic in March of that year despite being nearly 30 weeks pregnant at that stage.
She pleaded guilty earlier this year to administering a poison with intent to procure a miscarriage. Catt told a psychiatrist she had taken the drug while her husband was away and delivered the baby boy by herself at home.
She said the child was not breathing or moving and that she had buried his body but has not revealed the location. She did not tell anyone what had happened. The court heard that Catt gave a child up for adoption in 1999.
She later had a termination with the agreement of her husband, tried to terminate another pregnancy but missed the legal limit, and concealed another pregnancy from her husband before the child’s birth.
Mr Justice Cooke said she had robbed the baby of the life it was about to have and said the seriousness of the crime lay between manslaughter and murder.
He said: “The critical element of your offending is the deliberate choice made by you, in full knowledge of the due date of your child, to terminate the pregnancy at somewhere close to term, if not actually at term, with the full knowledge that termination after week 24 was unlawful and in full knowledge your child’s birth was imminent.”
Catt made a search on the internet on May 21 2010 asking what would happen if she took the drug at term, and on May 26 she asked how soon the drug would work.
Mr Justice Cooke said: “It’s a fair inference you must have taken the drug somewhere around that time.” On May 27 she went on holiday to France. The judge said Catt could have been charged with destruction of a child.
He added: “What you did was end the life of a child that was capable of being born alive by inducing birth or miscarriage. “What you have done is rob an apparently healthy child, vulnerable and defenceless, of the life which he was about to commence.”
The judge said Catt would have been charged with murder if the baby had been born a few days later and she had then killed him. Speaking after Catt’s guilty plea, Chief Inspector Kerrin Smith said: “During the investigation, North Yorkshire Police gathered evidence that Sarah Catt purchased medication via the internet which would facilitate a labour and delivery of a child.
“The evidence shows this to have happened in the final phase of pregnancy, the third trimester, ie within the last week of the due date that this baby should have been born.”
The detective added: “Sarah Catt has not co-operated with the investigation at any stage and so the question, ‘What has happened to the baby which Catt was carrying?’ remains unanswered. “To date, no remains of that pregnancy and no child has been traced.”