Research, data analysis, and commentary on abortion, fertility trends, and pro-natal policies.
Analysis of abortion complications data published by the DHSC and by NHS England shows that the government continues to deliberately under-report, and that it has excluded more than 99% of complication treatments for early medical abortions, from its official 2023 statistics report. On 15 January 2026, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) published... Continue Reading →
OHID: “There were 277,970 abortions for residents of England and Wales in 2023, the highest number since the Abortion Act was introduced and an increase of 11% compared with 2022.” [i] The government has just published the 2023 abortion statistics for England and Wales (15 January 2026). These were originally expected in June 2024 and... Continue Reading →
In 2023, the NHS paid BPAS: £39,000,000 to provide abortions to women not using contraception, and £17,000,000 to provide abortions to women whose contraception had failed. It is hard to understand why BPAS is so enthusiastic about its campaign for improved contraception services across the NHS, including the morning-after pill, either it believes that effective... Continue Reading →
I was recently asked to verify my claim made in an earlier post that “half of all Generation Z pregnancies now end in abortion.” The most recent set of cohort fertility data was published by the Office for National Statistics in July 2025, showing conceptions, maternities, and abortions data for different age-groupings, over the years... Continue Reading →
Kevin Duffy's reply highlights the escalation in UK abortion figures, quoting Baroness Finn's June 6, 2025, House of Lords statement on "the nearly 300,000 women who access abortion services across the UK every year", building on 2022's 251,377 recorded cases. https://twitter.com/KevinDTweets/status/1973663449369682340
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. Analysis of accredited official statistics published by NHS England and the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, shows that 1-in-17 of... Continue Reading →
Growing concerns over abortion pill safety on both sides of the Atlantic... Kevin Duffy has raised alarm over the findings that recent NHS figures reveal around 1,000 women each month require emergency care after experiencing issues linked to medical abortions.
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... Continue Reading →
A government minister or a higher-up in the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (OHID) must have decided that timely publication of Abortion Statistics is a waste of time and resource, what other reason is there for a further delay of ten months for this annual report? Parliamentary Questions need to be asked, again. UPDATE... Continue Reading →
Update on 15 January 2026 OHID has just published the 2023 abortion statistics for England and Wales. I have increased my 2024 estimate for the UK total to 305,000 - details are in this post: 2023: an 11% increase in abortion across England and Wales. In 2024, there were 300,000 abortions in the UK, an 11%... Continue Reading →
Official published data from NHS England show that every day, on average, 33 women are admitted as inpatients to an NHS hospital for treatment of abortion complications. This is more than double our earlier estimate of 14, which was based on FOI data.[i] This post: “Government under-reports abortion complications by a factor of 38x”, outlines... Continue Reading →
There were probably more than 300,000 abortions in the UK in 2024, up from our conservative estimate of 292,000 in 2023. This estimate is based on official published data in Scotland and Northern Ireland for 2023 and annual reports published by BPAS and MSI-RC for the same year. The last set of official data for... Continue Reading →
Providers of regulated healthcare are obliged by law to say “Sorry” to patients when something goes wrong. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) details this in its Regulation 20: Duty of Candour. This post examines whether it is possible that BPAS failed to meet this statutory requirement in at least 5,000 cases during the last year.... Continue Reading →
In 2022, official reporting of abortion complications by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) shows just 300 cases across England and Wales. For the year 2022-23, official data from NHS England show 11,256 women diagnosed with abortion complications at an NHS hospital. The NHS data are known to the OHID, as evidenced in its November 2023 report which compares these two data sources, Abortion Notification System (ANS) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), and yet government officials refuse to make any change to official annual reporting. The NHS England data are easily accessible by any interested person and the above 11,256 can be retrieved online from NHS Digital in a matter of minutes. No prolonged data compilation, cleaning, and analysis; no need for a Freedom of Information request.
We have published a new report outlining findings from an FOI investigation in which we requested data related to the diagnosis of abortion complications, from all NHS Hospital Trusts in England. Key Points The Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (part of the Department of Health and Social Care) published a one-off report in November... Continue Reading →
A new study provides insight into how women describe the challenges they face when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy, how she describes her situation, circumstances, thoughts, and feelings – in her own words – before she has any contact with the pregnancy support team. From our many years of conversations with women experiencing post-abortion distress,... Continue Reading →
An effective medical abortion is defined by the MARE Guidelines[i] as a successful expulsion of an intrauterine pregnancy without the need for surgical intervention, clarified by the following sub-categories: Continuing pregnancy: treated with surgical management Continuing pregnancy: patient opted to continue or outcome is unknown Retained products treated with surgical management (an evacuation of retained... Continue Reading →
In its recently published report into abortion statistics for 2022 (England and Wales), the UK Government presented misleading and incomplete data about the numbers of complications arising from medical abortions; and worse still, they knew they were doing so.[i] In fairness to the reporting team at the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, they do... Continue Reading →
We can now say with more certainty that in 2022, the total abortions in England and Wales will have been about 250,000, a substantial year-on-year increase of 17%, compared with an annual average increase of less than 3% over the last 53 years. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) has only published data... Continue Reading →
In the last five years across England and Wales, at least 39,000 women have been treated at NHS hospitals for complications arising from failed or incomplete DIY medical abortions at home; in the past, these complications would have been treated at the abortion providers’ facilities. Five years ago, abortion was only provided at approved abortion... Continue Reading →
