A judge has jailed a mother for two years after she took abortion pills to kill her unborn baby at eight months’ gestation.

Carla Foster, 44, took the abortion-inducing drugs sent to her in the post when she was between 32 and 34 weeks pregnant.

The upper time limit for abortion in the UK is 24 weeks but Foster, a mother of three, said she was too embarrassed to see a doctor when she conceived in 2019 and did not know how advanced her pregnancy was.

She had been searching the internet for ways of ending a late pregnancy and when Health Secretary Matt Hancock permitted abortion pills to be sent through the post in March 2020, at the start of lockdown, she obtained the mifepristone and misoprostol through the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.