Last month, after a mysterious eighteen-month delay, the U.K. government finally published the 2023 abortion figures for England and Wales. When adding in the numbers for the rest of the U.K., the figures revealed over 299,000 abortions took place across Britain in a single year, a new record. Almost one in three pregnancies in the U.K. now ends in abortion.
Such figures are hard to comprehend, so perhaps it helps to ponder that babies numbering the populations of Nottingham, Pittsburgh, or Venice are now being wiped out every year in the U.K. through abortion. In the context of our birth rate crisis, you do not have to be pro-life to find this profoundly unsettling. How have we got to this tragic point where so many human beings never see the light of day?
I would suggest the cause can be attributed to both legislative and cultural factors.
Legislation is often passed under the guise of responding to exceptional cases; yet, very quickly, it leads to normalization. So it has been with U.K. abortion laws, which permit abortion up to twenty-four weeks into pregnancy, double the most common time limit in mainland Europe.
On paper, abortion is only permitted in the U.K. in specific circumstances. However, the “mental health” grounds in the Abortion Act are now interpreted so broadly that we now have, de facto, abortion on demand up to twenty-four weeks in Britain. Abortion has been normalized via the legal interpretation of what was designed to be exceptional.
If that were not enough, however, in recent years there have been a succession of creeping further relaxations of U.K. abortion laws, often brought in via the back door through hasty amendments to unrelated government bills. One of the most disturbing of these was the introduction of the “pills by post” scheme, temporarily implemented in 2020 and then permanently in 2022, allowing women to obtain abortion pills without the safeguards provided by a prior in-person consultation with a medical professional. I, and many others, warned at the time about the likely effects of this scheme. These warnings have sadly proven prescient.
An abortion is a serious matter—something once recognized on both sides of the debate. It is unlike any other “medical” procedure in that it ends the life of another human being. However, the introduction of abortion via pills received in the mail easily disguises this reality (at least until the abortion takes place, when many women find a medical abortion is far more unpleasant and traumatic than they had been led to believe).
The previous requirement for an in-person consultation before an abortion could take place ensured women had a face-to-face conversation before going ahead with their decision. Such conversations are healthy as they enable women to consider the momentous nature of the decision they are making. But abortion via mail-order pills easily gives the impression that abortion is like any other “health” issue, a temporary irritation solved by medication. No doubt, many people now also conflate the contraceptive pill with the abortion pill; the practical similarities obscure the ethical chasm that exists between preventing a pregnancy and ending one.
But the reckless downward spiral in U.K. abortion legislation only partly explains the country’s 300,000 abortions a year. There are also wider cultural factors at play.
The abortion lobby, seeking to wash its hands of responsibility for the scale of abortion in the U.K.—and its own part in lobbying for “pills by post”—has sought to point the finger elsewhere, at the cost of living crisis. But Ann Furedi, the former chief executive of British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Britain’s largest abortion provider, has herself quite rightly blown this narrative out of the water, dismissing it as a convenient myth since “it takes moral pressure off the woman” by deflecting responsibility to fiscal policy.
Furedi points out that her former organization’s framing “makes no sense at all.” After all, “women in very difficult financial circumstances have children—and often larger families.” The truth is that a series of social shifts have converged to create a context that has not only minimized the gravity of abortion, but also the joy and enrichment of having children at all. At the same time that abortion has become normalized, family life has been de-normalized.
In a fascinating recent article for the Free Press, Kara Kennedy, commenting on U.K. abortion numbers, downplayed economic motivations. Citing the experience of a dozen women she interviewed, she found that British women were often choosing to abort because they did not feel able or ready to become mothers.
The article’s summary of its findings was particularly revealing: “the pressure [to abort] . . . was internal—and relentless.” In other words, women were having abortions not so much because of external pressure but rather because of their own internal feelings.
The alarming truth is that we have created a culture where women feel they do not wish to have, or would not cope with having, children. As Kennedy put it, the women she interviewed “made that decision [to abort] within a culture that they feel presents motherhood as an almost unbearable responsibility.” What was once widely considered the most fulfilling—and natural—role a woman could enjoy has become, at best, an optional extra for those who want it and, at worst, an impediment to self-fulfillment.
So, where do we go from here? Well, legislative changes are, in one sense, simpler to fix. And yet, the astonishing reality is that the British Parliament’s response to record abortion numbers has been to push for even more extreme abortion laws. The House of Lords, where I sit as a peer, is about to debate an amendment, passed by the House of Commons last summer, that would mean women could administer their own abortions up to birth for any reason with no remaining legal deterrent.
This is deeply concerning—it not only dilutes the few legal protections remaining for unborn babies, even after they would be viable outside of the womb, but also endangers women by incentivizing dangerous, unsupervised abortions late in pregnancy.
I am working with fellow peers to oppose this proposal and have tabled an amendment that would reintroduce in-person consultations with a medical professional before women can receive abortion pills. The push for “decriminalization” to full-term has arisen in part because a few women have faced prosecution for taking pills beyond the legal limit, via the “pills by post” scheme. The obvious solution, however, is to reinstate in-person appointments that allow reliable gestational age checks to take place. This would protect women from coercion and health risks.
Indeed, this is where legislative and cultural factors coalesce. Women’s health is currently being jeopardized by the desire to insist on ideological extremes. As Kennedy put it, reflecting on her research, “Abortion is routinely presented as a clean solution, a medical fix that women should celebrate, while open questions about whether multiple abortions place strain on the body, whether later-term abortions are more physically demanding, or whether abortion pills carry long-term side effects are rarely discussed.”
Regardless of what happens in the House of Lords next month, such cultural trends will take longer to address. Britain’s birth rate is in freefall. In 2023, the same year when there were nearly 300,000 abortions, just 591,072 live births were recorded in England and Wales. Up until now, the birth rate gap has been plugged via mass immigration. It is a striking statistic that since 1968, there have been a total of 10.9 million abortions in the U.K., while 10.7 million immigrants currently live in the country. Immigration has served as a replacement for a generation of unborn children, but its pace and scale have brought with them other problems.
We will not address the abortion crisis in the U.K. until we address the social factors that have led to this birth-rate decline. We need to rediscover the value and joy of having children, to re-normalize what was once taken for granted, and to find a way to support women so that they know an unplanned pregnancy will not ruin their lives.
At present, our culture is sadly wired the opposite way. Gemma, one of the British women quoted in Kennedy’s article, explained how “It’s so much easier to get an abortion than 10 minutes face-to-face with a doctor.” This cannot be right. When we make having an abortion sound easy, but having children sound inconvenient or ruinous, something has gone very wrong with our society that needs addressing. Responding to this may just be the greatest challenge facing lawmakers in the rest of the twenty-first century. The stakes are, quite literally, existential.
