A young Northern Irish woman who broke the law by taking medically tested abortion pills bought online has challenged the Police Service of Northern Ireland to arrest her and the Public Prosecution Service in the region to prosecute her.

Suzanne Lee from Belfast, who took the pills in August 2012 during her third year at university, said: “Either you arrest me and charge me, or you change this law.”

Lee said that as a student she could not afford around £1,000 to go to England for a termination.

“I didn’t really want to go to England anyway as I wanted to be around people who knew what I was going through. I didn’t want it in this kind of clinical setting where no one knew me – where I was just another number – so the best plan of action was to order the abortion pills off the net.”

Other women who bought the pills online have told the Guardian they have wiped out their internet search histories and deleted their text messages in case the data is used as evidence against them in court.

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Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK where the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply. Under a 19th-century law – the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 – anyone carrying out an abortion except under some extremely limited circumstances can be jailed for life.

The climate of fear among women who have procured pills from the Women on the Web NGO and WomenHelp.org has intensified due to the recent prosecution of a Northern Irish mother. She faces trial for procuring abortion pills for her underage daughter. Pro-choice activists believe someone reported her to the PSNI after she visited a local hospital for post-termination care.

The woman has been charged with procuring a poison or other noxious substance, in this case mifepristone and misoprostol, in the knowledge that they were to be used to cause a miscarriage.

In response to this case, several young women have spoken to the Guardian about the measures they resorted to in order to avoid having to pay for a private termination in an English hospital, which can cost several thousand pounds. All used the Women on the Web service to procure abortion pills.

Joanne (not her real name) became pregnant two years ago; she learned about the abortion pills service online.

“I got the pills because I didn’t like the idea of sneaking away to England and wanted it over with quickly,” Joanne said. “Besides, going to England would have raised questions from my parents whom I didn’t want to know what had happened to me. I never told them what I did, nor did I think I had to.”

Joanne said she was “paranoid” about her internet history and the text messages she used to procure the pills. All texts, emails and searches to Women on the Web had to be deleted after the pills arrived, she said.

“Cara” from Derry said she did not want to use her real name for fear of losing her job in the city. She said he had a termination in a Manchester hospital when she was a student aged 18 and didn’t want to repeat the experience when she fell pregnant again three years ago.

Like Joanne, Cara has also erased all her internet history about buying the pills. “I’m speaking about taking the medically tested pills to persuade other women to go down that route. But I can’t give out my own name because I work in a public place in Derry and there would people out there who would make your working life very unpleasant if they found out I had taken abortion pills. That is why I have been very, very careful even with my texts and internet searches.”

Taking a different approach, and issuing an open challenge to prosecutors, Lee said: “I have taunted the police to arrest me but I really don’t think they have the backbone to do that.”

She condemned the continued refusal of politicians at the Northern Ireland assembly to legislate for abortion even in limited circumstances, such as women made pregnant through rape and incest, or fatal foetal abnormality.

Of her experience ordering and taking the pills, Lee said: “The second day, as soon as I took them, I immediately started to bleed. It was strange because it was such a relief to start bleeding, to know that they were working, to know that soon it was going to be all over.”

She said she paid €90, which covers the price of somebody else’s abortion. “Somebody else pays for yours to kind of create this network of solidarity,” she said.



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She added: “No political party here is explicitly pro-choice [see footnote]. No party here supports what I do. So the only way I can think of changing things, and hopefully making sure other women go into their decisions educated, is by making this law unworkable and providing them with abortion pills.”

Lee said that after revealing that she taken abortion pills on social media her Facebook page was engulfed in abuse from anti-abortion activists.

“My favourite one calls me ‘the bride of Satan’. She said she hoped I would be burned to death because then I would also know what it would be like when I would burn in hell.”

Goretti Horgan, a veteran pro-choice campaigner and University of Ulster academic, said: “We know that, in a survey carried in the 1990s by Professor Colin Francome of Middlesex University, 11% of local GPs here said they had seen the effects of ‘attempts at amateur abortions’.

“We are very lucky here in Northern Ireland not to have had a woman die from a backstreet abortion since 1981, and there is no doubt that we have the proximity of England to thank for that.”

• Footnote (added 7 January 2016): the Green party in Northern Ireland is pro-choice – it supports extending the Abortion Act 1967 to Northern Ireland.