Research, data analysis, and commentary on abortion, fertility trends, and pro-natal policies.
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 →
BPAS team is awarded £3.85 million by Wellcome Trust to investigate Contragestive Time – very early medical abortion without needing to know that you are pregnant, ensuring a state of non-pregnancy – also to change our understanding of when reproduction and beginning of life occurs. 💊Contragestives operate in the invisible time between a possible conception... Continue Reading →
Heidi Stewart, chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), is urging Parliament to update abortion law to allow women to self-administer medical abortions at home throughout the entire first trimester—raising the current legal limit from 9 weeks and 6 days to 11 weeks and 6 days. She cites a recent study from Scotland,... 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 →
In 2022, the most recent year for which we have official reporting of abortion statistics for England, more than 11,000 women were admitted and treated at an NHS hospital for complications arising from a medical abortion;[i] this represents about 6% of those women using mifepristone and misoprostol at home, or misoprostol at home after taking... 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 →
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 early 2020, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists issued guidance to support a no-test protocol that was a prerequisite to the government’s approval for telemedicine abortion and pills-by-post. A critical element of this was its advice “that routine pre-abortion ultrasound scanning is unnecessary.” [1] In its published guidance, at section 2.1.1: ‘Gestation assessment’,... Continue Reading →
In its campaign to decriminalise abortion, BPAS is using the stories of women who have been prosecuted or investigated to tug at our heartstrings and using emotive language to bring us and our MPs onside with their support for the Criminal Justice Bill abortion decriminalisation amendments tabled by Dame Diana Johnson (NC1) and Stella Creasy... 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 →
Its directors say that the last few years have been a ‘turbulent period within BPAS’; that seems like a fair conclusion given damning reviews from the Care Quality Commission, the loss of £millions, a failed IVF business, and the resignation of the CEO and more than half of the senior officers. The BPAS Annual Report... Continue Reading →
BPAS is the largest abortion organisation in the UK, likely to have provided more than 100,000 abortions in 2023 (about 45% of all abortions). BPAS is collaborating with Dame Diana Johnson in her attempt to have abortion decriminalised in England and Wales. It is an organisation that has been struggling in recent years: In the... Continue Reading →
When talking about their ideology of abortion decriminalisation, activists will often emphasise that this will not mean abortion would be freed from all regulations. In this post we start to explore which regulations they might be referring to and whether these are currently being complied with. In tabling her proposed amendment to the Criminal Justice... Continue Reading →
Medical Abortion (MA), aka the abortion pill, doesn’t always work; it is well-established that MA has an expected and commonly occurring treatment failure rate of about 5%. Meaning that as many as 1-in-20 pregnant women using abortion pills will subsequently need additional medical treatment for complications arising from an incomplete abortion. Medical abortion treatment failure... Continue Reading →
In 2021/22, the twelve months ending March 2022, BPAS performed 93,136 abortions, an increase of 18% over the total in 2017/18, a period in which the total number of abortions in England and Wales increased by 11%. BPAS continues to expand its share of the UK abortion market, providing about 43% of the total in... Continue Reading →
It's not just about ‘safety’ – the abortion pill (mifepristone and misoprostol) is medically safe for the woman; serious complications from medical abortion including hospitalisation, blood transfusion, major surgery, or death are rare. Arguing for changes to the legal and regulatory control of medical abortion solely based on safety is a very weak argument. Now... Continue Reading →
BPAS has reported that its abortion services are “under considerable pressure” and that the number of calls it has been receiving increased by about a third in the six months March to September this year. During the same period our volunteers were making mystery client calls to BPAS and MSI Reproductive Choices, and we found... Continue Reading →
In its SmPC (summaries of product characteristics), Ranbaxy states that there is a non-negligible risk of medical abortion treatment failure, as follows: The non-negligible risk of failure, which occurs in 4.5 to 7.8% of the cases, makes the follow-up visit mandatory in order to check that abortion is complete. The patient should be informed that... Continue Reading →
