By Dave Andrusko
I recently ran across this post, but I simply was swamped and didn’t get to it. But it proved to be very much worth reading.
“Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?” is written by Kara Kennedy and appeared on January 29. I tucked it away but, as fate would have it, it was supplemented on February 3 by Ann Furedi who wrote, “What’s driving the huge rise in abortions?”
Who is Ann Furedi?
As chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) for years, Furedi was the leading voice for unhinged abortion-on-demand in Great Britain. So, I confess I was struck by the subhead: “Britain is experiencing a crisis of motherhood.”
Let’s look at Kennedy’s article first.
There has been a huge increase in abortions in England and Wales [“the UK”):
Abortion is increasingly common in the UK. According to government statistics released last week, the number of abortions in England and Wales has dramatically spiked, reaching its highest level since the Abortion Act was introduced in 1967. In 2023, there were 277,970 abortions—an 11 percent increase on the previous year. The abortion rate rose from 21.5 to 23.4 per 1,000 women. Put more simply: Close to one in three pregnancies in Britain now ends in termination.
She raises and dismisses the idea of the rising cost of living as an explanation (as does Furedi).
But if we want to understand the abortion spike, we need to be candid about the fact that abortion, in the UK, is something women are choosing to do.
As one key factor, Kennedy writes about
Abortion medication [the “abortion pill”] which has begun to function like emergency contraception: something you may never use but want within easy reach.
And [as was the case in the United States, thanks to the Biden administration], availability took a huge leap during Covid.
Until 2020, women seeking an early-stage abortion were required to attend a clinic to take the first of the two medications under supervision. That changed during the Covid lockdowns, when regulations were altered to allow women to have a brief online or phone consultation and then receive abortion pills by post. The measure was initially framed as a temporary emergency accommodation. But in 2022, the UK parliament voted in favor of permanently enabling women to induce their own abortions at home.
Whatever the combination of causes, Kennedy writes
[M]any women in developed, secular countries do not see a meaningful difference between preventing a pregnancy and ending one. In both cases, often all you have to do is take a pill.
In fact, “Multiple women told me that abortion care is also a lot better organized, more efficient, and easier to access than most services within the NHS.” “Sophie” told Kennedy it’s “so well run compared to other services for women.”
But, no doubt, there’s been a fundamental change in cultural attitudes not just toward abortion—women having multiple abortions is not uncommon— but also toward motherhood. In her conversations with women, Kennedy found
what emerged was a pervasive belief that parenthood is a high-risk opportunity to do irreversible harm, and that opting out entirely is the responsible choice. The fear in these women was palpable.
So, we are to conclude since it’s most often easier/quicker to obtain a chemical abortion than secure contraception and women don’t feel equipped to be mothers, and there has been a fundamental shift in attitudes, the number of abortions goes up and up.
What’s Furedi’s take? She agrees that
The ability to take a pill at home rather than have to attend an in-person clinic appointment has further transformed the perception and experience of abortion. Taking a tablet to cause your own miscarriage is very different to undergoing a procedure in a clinic. Many women found that abortion suddenly became far more acceptable than it had been previously.
Her ultimate conclusion—she prattles on about “fertilized eggs—is nonsense, but Furedi does understand the absence of many factors which once affirmed motherhood:
Why are a third of all women who receive a positive pregnancy test responding not with joy but with despair? Why are so many greeting the prospect of motherhood not with excitement, but with fear and despondency?
There are clearly socio-cultural forces at work here. For a start, taking the leap to embrace an unplanned pregnancy flies in the face of our risk-averse, hyper-planned, all-about-me modern culture. And the demands of child-raising seem daunting when we no longer know our neighbours, when we live far from our families, when relationships are transient and temporary.
Given the social and cultural environment in which we now live, perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that a third of women say ‘no’ to an unplanned pregnancy. Maybe it’s more surprising that two out of three women still do make the leap of faith and commit to raising a child.
As one commenter to Kennedy’s article observed
The true tragedy here that I see is that we have completely undermined women’s confidence to be mothers.