No this time because of legislation but because the Department of Health has published it’s annual statistical report on abortions. So here are the key headline facts:
- The total number of abortions performed on UK resident women in 2007 was 198,500. In 2006 this was 193,700 (2.5% rise).
- In addition 7,100 abortions were performed for non-resident women, in 2006 this was 7,400 thus constituting a drop of around 4%.
- 99% of those abortions were carried out under 20 weeks gestation
- 2.8% of those abortions were for young women under the age of 16 and (culmulatively) 24.3% for young women under the age of 20. Contrastingly 63.5% were for women aged 20-35 years old.
- 32% of women seeking abortion had had one or more abortions previously. The vast majority of those had had one previous termination (77%). Less than 1.6% had had more than three abortions. So this myth of the feckless woman having termination after termination is a complete misnomer.
- Of those 48% were black or black british women, 41% mixed heritage, 33% Chinese or other, 31% white and 28% asian or asian british. So this is one of those sites where multiple discriminations are in-play.
The statistics do cover the marital status of women (unsurprisingly largest group are unmarried women with a partner) but not their socio-economic class. More statistics later on changes over time (currently number crunching them!).