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Misguided Changes to Abortion Advice Services

I am strongly in favour of maintaining legalized abortions in the UK.

There is no doubt in my mind that Government plans to change abortion advice services are the result of lobbying from anti-abortion campaigners. I suspect this stems from the first TV ads by Marie Stopes last year, which received over 1000 complaints to the advertising watchdog. All of the complaints were rejected.

It is completely wrongheaded to imagine that women seek abortion advice because of moral ambiguity. What they want and need is medical information about the procedure and risks, and unbiased counselling about the personal benefits and alternatives. What they do not need is religious doctrine dressed up as personal advice. If I want to know the psychological risks of amputation, then the first person I would ask would be the surgeon and the last person would be the priest. (For that matter the psychiatrist would be pretty far down the list as well.)

Nobody is in any doubt about what happens to a foetus if a woman does or does not terminate a pregnancy. It either dies immediately or will likely be born as a child. This is stark enough not to need dressing up in language purposely designed to stir up even more emotional turmoil than a woman is bound to feel anyway. The mental tricks that anti-abortion fundamentalists try to play on women are little short of psychological abuse.

One aspect of abortion in the UK does concern me. It is the sheer scale of it. When I analysed the figures a few years ago I was astonished, and I have checked and repeated the calculations with the latest information from the Department of Health. They show that abortions are being carried out at the rate of 1.7% of resident women aged 15-44 per year. This is despite the many women who find it difficult to conceive, and the rate is equivalent to an average of 0.5 abortions per woman’s lifetime. Surely that level of unwanted pregnancies must result from poor education, and I certainly would like to see something done to prevent the pregnancies in the first place. Sex education in English state schools is a disgrace. As far as I can tell it barely happens at all and is carried out by the unwilling and untrained. No doubt this stems from prudish attitudes towards sex from centuries of religious Puritanism. I’m sure the irony will not be lost.

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