A Northern Irish woman who bought pills over the internet to induce an abortion has been given a suspended prison sentence. 
 
 The 21-year-old pleaded guilty to procuring her own abortion by using a poison, and of supplying a poison with intent to procure a miscarriage, and was given a three-month sentence suspended for one year. 
 
 Her barrister told Belfast crown court on Monday that if his client had lived anywhere else in the UK, she would “not have found herself before the courts”. Northern Ireland is the only region of the UK where abortion is still illegal. 
 
 Crown prosecutor Kate McKay said that on 20 July 2014 the Police Service of Northern Ireland were contacted by the woman’s housemates. The police were told that she had bought drugs online that had induced a miscarriage eight days earlier. 
 
 PSNI officers sent to the rented accommodation in south Belfast found a male foetus inside a black bag in a household bin, the court was told. 
 
 The court heard that the woman had told her housemates that she tried to travel to England for a termination but could not cover her costs. She had then been told by a clinic about mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs available on the internet that would induce a miscarriage. The housemates were “taken back by the seemingly blase attitude” adopted by the woman, a crown lawyer told the court. 
 
 The defence barrister said that at the time the woman was 19 and living with people she barely knew. His client felt “isolated and trapped … with no one to turn to” and resorted to “desperate measures”. 
 
 The barrister said the woman had since had a baby with her partner and “was trying to put her life back together again”. 
 
 The judge Mr Justice McFarland said the advice given to the woman about the pills had been delivered “without knowledge of her background, and details were perhaps inappropriate”. 
 
 The British Pregnancy Advisory Service said the woman “is a victim of Northern Ireland’s draconian abortion laws and the refusal of politicians to act to protect the health of their constituents. A BPAS spokesperson added: “We call on all politicians to repeal these antiquated, Victorian laws and create an abortion framework fit for women in 2016. We deserve nothing less.” 
 
 Under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, anyone carrying out an abortion in Northern Ireland, except under some extremely limited circumstances, can be jailed for life. 
 
 A number of other women in the region face prosecution for procuring pills from pro-choice organisations such as The Women on the Web or Womenhelp.org. 
 
 • This article was amended on 6 April 2016. An earlier version said the jail sentence had been suspended for two years; that has been corrected to one year. ||||| Looking for news you can trust? 
 
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 Ever since Texas passed HB2 in 2013, the omnibus abortion law at the heart of a pivotal case the Supreme Court will review early next year, more than half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics have been forced to close. As these closures have mounted, advocates in the state have worried that the decline in abortion access could lead to a rise in the number of women trying to terminate pregnancies by themselves. 
 
 A new study quantifies some of those fears: At least 100,000 Texas women—and as many as 240,000—between the ages of 18 and 49 have attempted to self-induce abortions, according to a report released today by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP). The study also found that it is possible that the rate of women attempting to self-induce abortions is rising in Texas as a result of the state’s additional restrictions on abortion care. The report points to previous studies that have explored the correlation between a rise in abortion restrictions and the prevalence of self-induced abortions. A 2008 national study found that about 2 percent of women reported that they tried to terminate pregnancies on their own. In 2012, a year after Texas passed several new abortion restrictions, a study of Texas women seeking care at an abortion clinic found that about 7 percent reported attempting to end their pregnancies without medical assistance before seeking clinic care. 
 
 “This is the latest body of evidence demonstrating the negative implications of laws like HB2 that pretend to protect women but in reality place them, and particularly women of color and economically disadvantaged women, at significant risk,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, one of the study’s co-authors and a professor in the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, in a press call Tuesday morning. 
 
 Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, an independent abortion provider in Texas and the lead plaintiff in the HB2 case currently before the Supreme Court, reiterated that Texas has seen a rise in self-induced abortions since abortion restrictions like HB2, and that terminating a pregnancy with DIY methods is not healthy for women. “Nobody should be denied safe and compassionate care based on her zip code,” said Hagstrom Miller. “But that’s exactly what’s been happening. 
 
 These findings come from a survey of nearly 800 women, ages 18 to 49, conducted by TxPEP over two months in 2014 and 2015. The women were asked if they knew or suspected that their best friend had ever self-induced an abortion, and if they’d ever done so themselves. Overall, 1.7 percent of respondents said they had tried to self-induce an abortion, while 4.1 percent of women said they knew or suspected their best friend had done so. Applying these proportions to the nearly 6 million women of reproductive age in Texas, the researchers concluded that an estimated 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women ages 18-49 have attempted to end a pregnancy alone. 
 
 The study identifies two populations where histories of self-induced abortion were most prevalent: Latina women living in a county that borders Mexico—a more rural area of the state that has seen several clinic closures—and women who reported difficulty gaining access to reproductive health care in the past. 
 
 The study also determined that the two broad categories of methods used by women to end their pregnancies were home remedies such as herbs, teas, vitamins, or medications—primarily misoprostol—obtained in Mexico without a prescription by women traveling there. 
 
 Typically, a medication abortion in the United States requires that two drugs—misoprostol and mifepristone—be taken about 24 hours apart. But most doctors say misoprostol alone can be an effective way to induce an abortion if the combined regimen is not available. Most of the women who reported obtaining misoprostol had a complete abortion after using the drug, but used different doses and methods of administration. Many reported intense symptoms throughout the abortion—intense cramping and bleeding, for instance—and some talked about being unsure whether these symptoms were normal or healthy. 
 
 Most women cited one or more of four reasons for choosing to self-induce: They lacked the money to travel and/or pay for the procedure; their local clinic had closed; a close friend or family member had recommended self-induction; or the women feared the stigma associated with going to an abortion clinic. 
 
 But Grossman pointed out that among these specific reasons, “a common layer was that poverty layered on one or more of these obstacles led women to self-induce.” ||||| Three women handed themselves in at a Northern Irish police station on Monday evening hoping to be arrested for procuring abortion pills, in protest at the country's restrictive laws. 
 
 To the cheers of pro-choice campaigners standing outside, Diana King, 71, Colette Devlin, 68, and Kitty O'Kane, 69, reported to Strand Road police station in Derry and gave officers a statement saying they had received mifepristone or misoprostol pills for women too afraid to have them delivered to their homes. 
 
 The drugs can safely induce an abortion up to nine weeks into a pregnancy, but are illegal to take without a doctor's consent anywhere in the UK. 
 
 In England, Scotland, and Wales, women can be prescribed the drug or receive a surgical abortion on the NHS, but in Northern Ireland all abortion is illegal except when a woman's life is at risk or there is a serious or permanent risk to her mental or physical health. Abortion is not allowed in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities, rape, or incest. 
 
 Northern Irish women can travel to the UK to get an abortion, but are not eligible to receive one on the NHS so need to have £1,000 to £2,000 ($1,500 to $3,000) to spend on travel, accommodation, and private treatment. 
 
 "We do now have one law for the rich and one law for the poor," said King in a statement outside the police station, reported the Derry Journal. "If you can raise the £1,000 to £2,000 to travel to GB [Great Britain] for a legal abortion no-one will bother you, but if you access the nine-week abortion pills online for £60, there's a climate of fear resulting from Stormont [the Northern Ireland Assembly]and the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] hounding women who are already at their most vulnerable. 
 
 "I don't want to believe our politicians will let this continue, but I fear they will, so it is up to us to keep campaigning." 
 
 Related: We Traveled On Board the Irish 'Abortion Bus' That's Giving Illegal Pills to Women 
 
 The retired social worker, who has been campaigning for years to have the UK's 1967 Abortion Act extended to Northern Ireland, told the Guardian she would tell the authorities she had not committed any offence because the drugs are not "poisonous substances, but are seen by the World Health Organisation as essential medicines." The women knew going to jail was a possibility, she said, "but we will be saying that we don't think that we have done anything wrong." 
 
 A Facebook post uploaded while the women were being questioned, reported by the BBC, said "People handing themselves in highlights the unworkability of the law. It lays bare the hypocrisy of the government and pressures the state to scrap it. 
 
 "If the police wish to criminalize one woman for a crime that so many of us have committed, then there can be no exception to the law, we must be arrested as well... Prisons would be filled to the brim if the law was actually enforced." 
 
 The women were questioned for about three hours before being released pending a report to the Public Prosecution office, said the BBC. 
 
 Last June more than 200 people signed an open letter stating they had either taken abortion pills or helped women access abortion pills in Northern Ireland, and they were willing to be arrested. 
 
 Police took no action, which is why King, Devlin, and O'Kane have stepped forward, said the Guardian — seeing themselves as good candidates to take proactive action as they no longer have jobs which could be adversely impacted by a criminal record. 
 
 There were 16 abortions performed in Northern Irish hospitals last year according to Stormont government figures. More than 800 Northern Irish women traveled to the UK for the procedure, according to statistics from Britain's Department of Health. 
 
 Follow Miriam Wells on Twitter: @missmbc 
 
 Related: Gay Marriage Is Legal but Abortion Is Still a Crime in Ireland — Even in Rape or Incest Cases
– "It was the worst cramping I've ever had and probably one of the worst pains I've gone through. And … there's always that slight uncertainty of ... I don't really know what I'm doing." This interview with a 24-year-old Texas woman, part of a University of Texas report on reproductive legislation released Tuesday, underscores the measures women in the Lone Star State are taking as access to abortion facilities is restricted, the Guardian reports. Findings of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project are startling: Between 100,000 and 240,000 Texan women ages 18 to 49 have taken matters into their own hands and tried to induce an abortion at home, with, as the Guardian puts it, "varying degrees of success and differing medical consequences." The report asked an online sample of 779 women if they or their best friends had ever tried to self-induce an abortion, with 1.7% saying they had and 4.1% saying their best friend had or they suspected she had, the Atlantic reports. Extrapolating those figures to the nearly 6 million women of reproductive age in Texas is how researchers came to the final numbers, Mother Jones notes. In terms of methods used to attempt an abortion, the drug misoprostol was the most commonly cited, with others including "herbs or homeopathic remedies," alcohol, illegal drugs, hormonal pills, and "getting hit or punched in the abdomen," per the Atlantic. Texas restrictions on abortions are among the strictest in the US: The 2013 HB2 law has shut more than half the state's 41 abortion clinics. The CEO of a gynecology and abortion care organization tells the Guardian that the result is "tremendously disrespectful. Abortion is legal in this country," she says. "And so every woman deserves to have access to whatever method for terminating her pregnancy safely she might choose in her local community." (The Supreme Court will hear arguments over a provision that could leave just 10 or so abortion clinics open in Texas.)