1,000 women treated each month for abortion complications

In each of the last two years, more than 12,000 women were admitted to hospital in England for treatment of complications arising from a medical abortion. The Department of Health and Social Care has still not told us how many women had an abortion in 2023, but NHS England has just published its data on abortion complications up to March 2025.

Year	ANS	HES
2017	303	9,593
2018	336	9,883
2019	337	10,228
2020	247	8,618
2021	299	10,078
2022	300	11,256
2023		12,287
2024		12,140

In the table above, ANS data are for England and Wales in the noted calendar year (January to December); HES data are for England in each period of twelve months from e.g., April 2017 to March 2018.

Read this earlier post for a fuller explanation of these data.

In the five years since the introduction of pills-by-post, more than 54,000 women have been admitted to an NHS hospital in England for the treatment of complications arising from the use of abortion pills.

The official 2023 Abortion Statistics from DHSC (OHID) are now more than 10 months late.