The two irrefutable abortion facts
By Dr John R. Ling
When it comes to abortion, there are two irrefutable facts we need to grasp – nobody doubts or disagrees with these.
First, the numbers. For England and Wales, these official statistics are published by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. Historically, legalised abortion started here on 27 April 1968 – six months after the 1967 Abortion Act had received the Royal Assent – so the first full-year’s total relates to 1969 and amounted to 54,819. Abortion numbers rose inexorably to around 180,000 by the late 1980s and then, for the next twenty or so years, they more or less plateaued in the region of 190,000. They breached the egregious 200,000 boundary three times between 2006 and 2008. That is the historic overview.
Now consider the latest contemporary picture. During 2021, the total number of abortions performed in England and Wales, on residents plus non-residents, was 214,869 – the highest ever. Moreover, according to Public Health Scotland, the total figure there for 2021 was 13,758. Only recently has the 1967 Act been extended to Northern Ireland and no figures have yet been published. In other words, the grand 2021 total for Great Britain was well in excess of 200,000; to be precise, it was 228,627. This is similar to the entire population of cities like England’s York, Wales’s Swansea or Scotland’s Aberdeen. It also means that over 4,000 abortions occur in Great Britain every week. That is approximately 880 every weekday – every Monday, every Tuesday, every Wednesday … Can you believe that? Sometimes I have to do the arithmetic again, just to check that huge daily figure. It is equivalent to about thirty classrooms, or eighteen coachloads, of children each day. If a blazing catastrophe or appalling road accident killed that number of children, think of the shock, the graphic newspaper headlines and the constant TV news bulletins. Yet 880 daily abortions evoke none of these.
And remember, we are not talking about faraway places, like Kenya, the USA, or China. This is happening in Great Britain, where you live and work, and go to hospital and church – in truth, it is on your doorstep. Nowadays, 1 out of every 5 pregnancies in England and Wales ends in abortion. And an estimated 1 in 4 women in England and Wales will have had an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. Think about that as you push your shopping trolley around your local supermarket.
Since the implementation of the 1967 Abortion Act, the total number of abortions performed in the UK, from 1968 to 2021, has recently reached 10 million. Some 15 per cent of our population is missing. But maybe you do not live in the UK. Abortion still occurs on your doorstep, in your neighbourhood, in your homeland – it is a worldwide practice. For example, about 0.9 million abortions occur in the USA each year, 0.5 million in Japan, and an estimated 11 million in India and 13 million in China. The global total is now reckoned to be approximately 42 million every year. Just pause, sit back and try to absorb something of the enormity of abortion. These data are official, staggering and condemnatory.
The second set of irrefutable facts relates to what is aborted. The ‘favourite’ time for abortion is under ten weeks’ gestation – 89 per cent of abortions in England and Wales during 2021 occurred within this developmental period. Such an unborn child would fit snugly into the palm of your hand; she has eyes, fingernails and fingerprints, she moves, she swallows, she digests, she sucks her thumb. Blood has been coursing through her body for several weeks – her rudimentary heart began to beat on about day 21. We have been told that this is just a vague collection of undifferentiated cells, or a little piece of poorly defined tissue. What tosh! We have been duped.
Most abortions in the UK are lawful up to twenty-four weeks. Have you ever seen an unborn child of that gestational age? Such an early-bird daughter was born to friends of mine – it would have been unthinkable to ever contemplate harming, let alone killing, her. Though babies of this age often struggle, most of them survive and thrive. What a topsy-turvy world of medical ethics we live in – doctors and nurses can be fighting to preserve the life of such a premature child in the intensive care unit, while down the corridor, in the same hospital, their colleagues can be deftly destroying an unborn child of a similar age. And if some form of handicap is suspected, not necessarily proved, then there is no time limit – abortion is lawful up to birth, yes, up to forty weeks.
In the UK we probably have the most savage abortion law in the whole world – we have been officially aborting just about the longest (since 1968), the latest (up to birth) and the laxest (easy access). Grammatically, these three little words – longest, latest, laxest – may be adjectival superlatives, but, when they are linked to the termination of the unborn, they become bioethically most pitiable.
These are the two irrefutable facts about abortion. What are you going to do about them? Snub them or fess up to them? Ignore or respond? You decide.
John R. Ling is the author of When does human life begin? and The morning-after pill. He has lectured, debated, broadcast and written about bioethical issues for more than 40 years.
This article was originally published at johnling.co.uk and is reproduced with kind permission.