Sex by Numbers by David Spiegelhalter

Author:David Spiegelhalter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

90,000: estimated number of illegal abortions in Britain each year in the 1930s

So, if your contraception does fail, what do you do next? The history of termination of pregnancies stretches back thousands of years, whether induced by herbs, drugs or mechanical means.g Statistics are sparse and unreliable: we know that abortifacient drugs such as diachylon were used extensively in the late 1800s and early 1900s for ‘bringing on periods’. It’s been argued that the highest abortion rates occurred in the 1930s, with widely varying estimates of 60,000 to 125,000 a year23 – the accepted figure is around 90,000 a year at a time when there were 600,000 live births annually.24 This then illegal practice may have accounted for around 13% of pregnancies: an extraordinarily high figure.

After a long and heated argument abortion became legal in the UK in April 1968. By 1973 there were 167,000 each year, although a third of these were non-residents who came for their abortions, many from Ireland. In 2013 there were 185,000 registered abortions in England and Wales, which was around one in five of all pregnancies25 – about double the rate estimated in the 1930s, when it was illegal. Nearly all were under three months’ gestation, and around half were medical abortions induced by drugs (mifepristone): in 1991 only 4% were medical.

Figure 44 shows the distribution of numbers of abortions to residents of England and Wales by the age of the woman. The peak is for 22-year-olds: overall, 1.6% of women between 15 and 44 had an abortion in 2013, the lowest rate for sixteen years. As we saw in Chapter 7, more than half of all pregnancies in adolescents aged 15 end in abortion, and this figure drops steadily until, for women aged 30–34, only around one in ten pregnancies ends in abortion. Then the rate rises again – around one in three pregnancies to women over 40 ends in abortion.

Figure 44: The number of abortions to residents of England and Wales, 2013

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