Pills in the post: how Covid reopened the abortion wars

Lockdown revolutionised women's access to home treatment - and strengthened the anti-abortion backlash

Kay, 34, realised her period was late a month into Britain's lockdown. The coronavirus death count was spiralling across the country. Covid-19 was putting the NHS under unprecedented strain and Boris Johnson had given the British people what he described as a very simple instruction" in an address to the nation from Downing Street: You must stay at home."

A worrying, unsettling time, and Kay, a mother of a six-year-old girl, needed to get hold of a pregnancy test kit. She went online and, two days later, took delivery of the test, learning of a positive result via two pink lines. It was the news she had dreaded.