by Ann Furedi, spiked
Britain is experiencing a crisis of motherhood.
There has been a significant rise in the number of abortions carried out in England and Wales over the past few years. According to government statistics published at the start of the year, abortions increased by 11 per cent in 2023 compared with 2022. This follows on from a 17 per cent increase in abortions in 2022 compared with 2021.
It’s true that abortion numbers have been climbing steadily since the mid-1990s. But it certainly looks as if the numbers have risen sharply in the 2020s. Despite some attempts to play these figures down, this is a hugely significant increase.
Some have attempted to blame the rise on financial insecurity, housing problems and the closure of family-planning clinics. But such explanations don’t cut it. Thirty years working in abortion services taught me that there is no direct correlation between the state of the economy or housing provision and abortion numbers.
This kind of uptick in abortion numbers suggests something specific has changed. This has only happened once before – in the mid-1990s – when a panic about the safety of the most popular contraceptive pills triggered tens of thousands of women to stop taking them. This led to a nine per cent increase in abortions in the ensuing months.
The pill panic of 1995 had a huge social and cultural impact. It arguably led to the de-stigmatisation and perhaps the beginning of the ‘normalisation’ of abortion.
So what’s driving the huge increase in abortion numbers in the 2020s? A key driver is likely to have been the government’s decision to allow abortion pills to be sent by post during the Covid lockdown – a temporary allowance that the government later made permanent.
NB: The author of this piece, Ann Furedi, is an abortion rights activist. She is the former chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest independent abortion provider.