Inside social media’s illicit abortion trade – where a late termination costs £350
It’s taken less than 10 minutes to find someone willing to sell me abortion pills.
Dr Jane* tells me she is based in Dubai but assures me the medication will arrive in the UK in a matter of days. How pregnant you are doesn’t matter – she provides pills as late as eight months.
*Warning: This article contains some material readers may find disturbing*
But I am not in the late stages of pregnancy, and this is not the depths of the dark web we are messaging on,
This is Facebook and I’ve told Dr Jane I’m a journalist. I found her within minutes of searching for abortion pills on the site.
In the last two years, six women have faced trial in Britain for allegedly illegally procuring their own abortions, compared to just three convictions between 1861 and 2022.
In Britain, abortions are free on the NHS with pills used up to 10 weeks and when COVID hit, these were made available by post.
Medical (using pills) and surgical abortions can be performed up to 24 weeks. After this, abortions can only be performed in a limited number of circumstances, such as if the mother’s life is at risk.
Abortions have risen to the highest number on record in England and Wales, with 251,377 taking place in 2022. Abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choices said it believes pressures due to the cost-of-living crisis combined with a lack of access to contraception through stretched NHS services are both “playing a bigger role” in this.
In 2023, Carla Foster was jailed for lying to the Pills by Post scheme and taking abortion pills at 32 weeks pregnant. She spent a month in prison before an appeal moved her sentence to a suspended one.
But despite the increased availability of pills on the NHS through such schemes, abortion medication is still being sold on social media sites to people without a prescription.
Using pills bought online to abort a pregnancy is illegal under the UK’s 1861 abortion law – half of the women who faced trial since 2022 had acquired them this way.
Found within a few clicks, the pills are sold by people claiming to be doctors, but whose credentials are almost impossible to verify.
Dr Jane’s profile picture is of a smiling woman with a stethoscope around her neck – but that image is actually taken from the website of a retina specialist in Florida.
The fake Dr Jane told me via Messenger that she is a nurse in Dubai and smuggles the pills out of the hospital where she works.
For an early-stage pregnancy, it is £150. Anything above six months costs £300.
Pills can be taken as late as eight months, she says, and sends graphic images of foetuses claiming to have helped abort them. Their tiny features are visible and veined, and they are clearly dead. But whether she did help abort them is difficult to know.
A medical expert who looked at the images for me said it is impossible to tell if they were generated by AI or at what stage the miscarriages occurred. But they said they would question the credibility of anyone who sent images like these as “proof”.
“Abortion is a woman’s right. It shouldn’t be illegal,” Dr Jane says. No woman, she claims, has ever died from pills she has sold.
Eventually, she stops answering my questions and when I go to message her a week later, her account is gone.
“Dr Jane” is not an anomaly. When her account disappears, there are still dozens of others to choose from.
Prices for a pack of pills vary from £190 to more than £300 – although one seller on Telegram says I can bulk buy 10 “abortion kits” for £575 if I am interested in selling them.
In contrast, the pills are actually “very cheap” to buy direct from the manufacturer for NHS and medical providers, one gynaecologist tells me. One costs approximately 17p per tablet and the other is £10.14 per tablet.
In one Facebook group, a woman posts about needing help. Within minutes, there are multiple comments from sellers offering advice and pills. Some sellers openly post WhatsApp numbers they use to deal directly with buyers.
After I join one of these groups, I receive a message from Layla*.
Layla’s Facebook picture comes from Pinterest. With red hair, lurid eyeshadow, and black-ringed lips, it gives her account a dark feel.
I ask what she would do for someone who was over the UK’s legal limit.
Layla tells me she has done this before, that aborting after 24 weeks is going to be “painful”.
“You are going to push a baby out,” she says.
She claims to have helped one woman (not in the UK) who was 29 weeks pregnant.
Buying abortion pills from her would cost £358 as, like with Dr Jane, the price rises the later a woman is in her pregnancy. The money is paid via GCash, a Filipino payment service, which suggests that is where she is based but she claims to ship pills all around the world.
“I have a lot of clients who went through the process and they all come out successful and free,” Layla says. “No one has ever died. No one was brought to the hospital.”
But while Layla tries to paint it as low-risk, multiple qualified doctors told me that late, at-home abortions can be deeply traumatic and high risk.
“Dr Jane” also includes a package of injections in her “abortion kit” – these are sometimes used to prevent bleeding, but this form of medication can be dangerous for home use, particularly for women with high blood pressure.
A leading gynaecologist campaigning to change the abortion law, Dr Jonathan Lord, says the trauma goes beyond just the physical process, “which obviously is very traumatic”.
“The trauma is why are they doing this in the first place? To be in a situation where they’re trying get pills illegally at six months pregnant, something calamitous must have happened to their life.”
Layla is vocal when she tells me her reasons for selling the pills.
“The world needs to know that a woman’s body belongs to her and not the government,” she says.
When I tell her about the rising number of women facing trial in the UK as a result of procuring abortion pills (both from the NHS and online), she tells me she knows what she does is illegal: “But that’s not the whole story.”
Abortion at any stage is illegal in the Philippines – anyone who performs one faces six years in prison under the country’s penal code, while women who undergo the procedure face between two and six years in jail.
She started selling pills after using them herself. She already had children and was struggling financially telling me: “Our life is hard”.
Layla was 18 weeks pregnant when she finally bought her own abortion pills, because she needed time to save the money.
The woman she bought them from then offered her the chance to resell them. She now gets paid $30 (£24) for every woman she “assists”. In the last two weeks, she says she has sold pills to 14 people around the world – although none in the UK.
Layla never handles the pills herself. “There’s my… you could call her my boss. I send orders to her, and she sends those orders to the shipper.”
She says she is one of seven women working under her “boss”.
Adverts for abortion pills can be found on social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok and Telegram, but they are particularly easy to locate on the Meta platforms. It takes just a few keywords to throw up several groups and posts from sellers.
On Instagram, sellers post infographics about abortion and encourage people to private message them, or link to Telegram chats posting pictures and prices of pills. One post details how to avoid detection, with advice including making a new email address to order pills and turning off location tracking.
These sellers are “unscrupulous opportunists”, says Louise McCudden, a spokesperson for charity MSI.
McCudden believes companies, like Meta, should take responsibility for allowing the trade to continue on their platforms.
“When global social media companies refuse to properly regulate their billion-dollar platforms, it leaves vulnerable women at the mercy of scammers, crooks, and frauds,” she adds.
“Ironically, it is often fear of prosecution which causes women in vulnerable circumstances to feel they must rely on unregulated suppliers rather than accessing care within the NHS.”
Read more: What are the UK’s abortion laws and punishments for breaking them?
Venny Ala-Siurua is the executive director of Women on Web (WoW) – a non-profit online abortion service that sends abortion medication worldwide, legally providing pills to women up to 12 weeks.
WoW said it used to receive five requests every day from women in the UK, but this rapidly dropped to almost zero when the NHS introduced Pills by Post.
But Venny says “these [illegal] sellers operate very openly”.
WoW experiences a different problem and struggles with the Facebook algorithm not being able to distinguish between their content and that of these illegal sellers.
Venny herself has been permanently banned from Facebook and the site often takes down WoW’s own abortion-focused content for violating the company’s “community rules”.
“We have a team almost full-time trying to negotiate with Meta to get our content back up,” she says.
When asked about this, and Sky News’s findings, Meta says: “We want our platforms to be a place where people can access reliable information about health services such as abortion, advertisers can promote health services, and everyone can discuss and debate public policies in this space.
“Content about reproductive health must follow our rules, including those on pharmaceutical drugs and misinformation.”
Meta said it had removed violating content brought to its attention.
Telegram and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
An amendment by Labour MP Diana Johnson to the Criminal Justice Bill would have stopped anyone facing prosecution for ending their own pregnancy in England and Wales.
However, in the wake of the general election announcement, discussions on the bill have been shelved following an early dissolution of Parliament.
Catherine Robinson, from Right to Life UK, said Sky News’s findings of the availability of abortion pills on social media were “extremely disturbing”.
And there is little to stop these online sellers, who paint their dangerous trade as almost heroic.
In reality, it is their failure to acknowledge the hazards of facilitating late-term abortions that is putting the lives of the very women they claim to help at risk.
*Names have been changed.
Ramesh lives in fear every day. A police siren is enough to alarm him.
He’s one of up to 400,000 visa overstayers in the UK, one lawyer we spoke to believes.
It’s only an estimate because the Home Office has stopped collecting figures – which were unreliable in the first place.
Britain is being laughed at, one man told us, “because they know it’s a soft country”.
‘Ramesh’ came to the UK from India
We meet Ramesh (not his real name) at a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, where he goes for food and support.
He insists he can’t return to India where he claims he was involved in political activism.
Ramesh says he came to the UK on a student visa in 2023, but it was cancelled when he failed to continue his studies after being involved in a serious accident.
He tells us he is doing cash-in-hand work for people who he knows through the community where he is living and is currently working on a house extension where he gets paid as little as £50 for nine hours labouring.
“It’s very difficult for me to live in the UK without my Indian or Pakistani community – also because there are a lot of Pakistani people who give me work in their houses for cleaning and for household things,” he adds.
‘What will become of people like us?’
Anike has lived in limbo for 12 years.
Now living in Greater Manchester, she came to the UK from Nigeria when her sister Esther was diagnosed with a brain tumour – she had a multi-entry visa but was supposed to leave after three months.
Esther had serious complications from brain surgery and says she is reliant on her sister for care.
Immigration officials are in touch with her because she has to digitally sign in every month.
Anike has had seven failed applications for leave to remain on compassionate grounds refused but is now desperate to have her status settled – afraid of the shifting public mood over migration.
“Everybody is thinking ‘what will become of people like us?'” she adds.
‘It’s a shambles’
The government can’t say with any degree of accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
But piecing together multiple accounts from community leaders and lawyers the picture we’ve built is stark.
Immigration lawyer Harjap Singh Bhangal told us he believed there could be several hundred thousand visa overstayers currently in Britain.
He says: “At this time, there’s definitely in excess of about 200,000 people overstaying in the UK. It might even be closer to 300,000, it could even be 400,000.”
Asked what evidence he has for this he replies: “Every day I see at least one overstayer, any immigration lawyers like me see overstayers and that is the bulk of the work for immigration lawyers.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked.”
The number of those who are overstaying visas and working cash in hand is also virtually impossible to measure.
‘They know Britain is a soft country’
“They’re laughing at us because they know Britain is a soft country, where you won’t be picked up easily,” says the local man we’ve arranged to meet as part of our investigation.
We’re in Kingsbury in northwest London – an area which people say has been transformed over the past five years as post-Brexit visa opportunities opened up for people coming from South Asia.
‘Mini-Mumbai’
The man we’re talking to lives in the community and helps with events here. He doesn’t want to be identified but raises serious questions about visa abuse.
“Since the last five years, a huge amount of people have come in this country on this visiting visa, and they come with one thing in mind – to overstay and work in cash,” he says.
“This area is easy to live in because they know they can survive. It looks like as if you are walking through mini-Mumbai.”
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‘The system is more than broken’
‘It’s taxpayers who are paying’
And he claims economic migrants are regularly arriving – who’ve paid strangers to pretend they’re a friend or relative in order to obtain a visitor visa to get to Britain.
He says: “I’ve come across so many people who have come this way into this country. It’s widespread. When I talk to these people, they literally tell me, ‘Oh, someone is coming tomorrow, day after tomorrow, someone is coming’.
“Because they’re hidden they may not be claiming benefits, but they can access emergency healthcare and their children can go to school.
“And who is paying for it? It’s the taxpayers who are paying for all this,” says the man we’ve met in north London.
Read more from Sky News:
Net migration figures hit four-year low
How Denmark may inspire UK asylum reforms
A Home Office spokesperson said: “We will not tolerate any abuse of our immigration system and anyone found to be breaking the rules will be liable to have enforcement action taken against them.
“In the first year of this government, we have returned 35,000 people with no right to be here – a 13% rise compared to the previous year.
“Arrests and raids for illegal working have soared to their highest levels since records began, up 63% and 51%.”
The government can’t say with accuracy how many visa overstayers there are in Britain – no data has been collated for five-and-a-half years.
Sky News has spoken to immigration lawyers about the numbers, and one believes there could be as many as 400,000 living across the country.
Harjap Singh Bhangal described the situation as a “shambles”.
“The Home Office doesn’t have any accurate data because we don’t have exit controls. It’s a shambles. It’s an institution where every wall in the building is cracked,” he told Sky’s Lisa Holland.
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The visa overstayers in ‘soft’ Britain
Why doesn’t the government know?
The Home Office used to gather data on visa overstayers by effectively checking a list of passport numbers associated with visas against a list of passport numbers of people leaving the UK, taken from airlines and other international travel providers.
If there was a passport number match in the arrivals and departures part of their database, that person was recorded to have left when they should have. If there wasn’t, they were a potential overstayer.
They stopped producing the figures because a combination of Brexit and COVID added complications that made the Home Office conclude they wouldn’t be able to get to a reliable number using the same method.
It’s now four and a half years since EU citizens had freedom of movement to the UK revoked, and more than three and a half years since pandemic-era travel restrictions ended.
And yet we are still waiting to see what a new method might look like.
Read more from Sky News:
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The old method wasn’t perfect. If someone changed their passport while in the UK, for example, or if the airline or individual entered the number wrong when they were leaving, there wouldn’t be a match.
The Home Office regarded the statistics as likely overestimating the true number of overstayers, and the Office for National Statistics designated the figures as “experimental” rather than “official” statistics, meaning the conclusions should be treated with caution. But they were a reasonable best guess.
With all that in mind, between April 2016 and March 2020 upwards of 250,000 people were flagged as potential overstayers, equivalent to 63,000 per year.
That’s more than the 190,000 people who are recorded to have arrived in the UK on small boats since 2018.
It represents 3.5% of the seven million visas that expired over that period, so at least 96.5% of people left when they should.
Other Home Office data reveals that more than 13 million visas were issued between 2020 and the end of June 2025, including a record 3.4 million in 2023.
But what we don’t know is how many have expired, which means it’s difficult for us to even guess how many people might have overstayed.
The Ministry of Defence have shared a picture of the British soldier who was killed in a “tragic accident” in Ukraine, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepares to give Donald Trump a revised plan for peace with Russia.
The Ukrainian president said his delegation is set to hand Kyiv’s proposal to Washington in the “near future”, ahead of talks between European leaders over the plan next week.
But they will comes after Mr Trump called European leaders “weak” and criticised them for failing to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
As it happened: Soldier who died in Ukraine pictured for first time
Meanwhile, tributes have come in for Lance Corporal George Hooley, a 28-year-old paratrooper who died on Tuesday while observing Ukrainian forces testing a new defensive capability away from the frontline.
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Is Europe’s transatlantic relationship with America on life support?
The MoD said he joined the army in November 2015 and was regarded as “an exceptional soldier and an impressive junior leader with extensive operational experience”.
In a statement released through the ministry, Lance Corporal Hooley’s commanding officer said that the paratrooper had had an “incredibly bright” future in the Parachute Regiment.
“I have no doubt that he would have continued to perform at the very front of his peer-group over the coming years,” they added.
“All members of The Parachute Regiment mourn his loss; however, our sorrow is nothing compared to that being felt by his family, our thoughts and prayers are with them at this incredibly difficult time.”
Lance Corporal George Hooley with his dog Mabel. Pic: Ministry of Defence
‘If you met George Hooley, you remembered it’
The company commander added: “If you met George Hooley, you remembered it.” They said the paratrooper had a “rare gift” and was a “model of professionalism”.
Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey said the Lance Corporal “served our country with distinction and professionalism” and was “an exceptional soldier who will be very deeply missed”.
“The tributes that have been paid to him are a testament to his exceptional attitude and ability,” Mr Healey said. “George’s tragic death reminds us of the courage and commitment with which our outstanding armed forces serve every day to protect our nation.”
Zelenskyy: Ukraine to share peace plan in ‘near future’
Mr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was finalising a 20-point peace document to share with the United States.
“We are working very productively to guarantee future security and prevent a recurrence of Russian aggression,” he said.
But Mr Trump had accused Mr Zelenskyy of not reading the original American-backed version of the peace proposal, and in an interview with Politico on Tuesday, claimed the Ukrainian president was “using war” to avoid holding an election.
Read more: Trump’s 28-point Ukraine peace plan in full
Later on Wednesday, Mr Zelenskyy said Kyiv’s peace delegation held a “productive conversation” with the US, and “discussed key issues for recovery, various mechanisms, and visions of reconstruction”.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke with the US president by phone on Wednesday.
In Ukraine shelling at a hospital in the occupied southern Kherson region killed three medical workers and injured two others, according to a governor installed by Russia.
And on Wednesday morning, Ukraine said its energy infrastructure had been targeted by Russian drone strikes in the southern Odesa region.
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