Britain climbs to top of Europe’s abortion list

November 12, 2009 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News

Britain has taken the top spot with the highest number of reported abortions in Europe in 2007.

Sifting through data provided by Eurostat, Norway-based Institute for Family Policies has found that Britain ranked at the top of the European abortion list for 2007, overtaking France, a country with nearly six million more people.

As teenage pregnancy rates have increased more than 30 percent over the last 10 years, abortion rates for girls under 18 have also increased. In fact, teen abortion rates were highest in Britain in 2007 with 48,150 among girls under 20. France reported 31,779 for the same age group.

The information comes on the heels of an announcement by Labour last week that all children aged five and older would receive compulsory sex education in school. Yet anti-abortion groups state that more sex education isn’t the answer when existing pregnancy prevention policies focused on sex education and contraception don’t work.

Phyllis Bowman, of the anti-abortion group Right to Life, told The Daily Mail: “These are not surprising figures. The government is not so much running a Teenage Pregnancy Strategy as a Teenage Abortion Strategy. Conceptions are not going down and abortion is going up, exactly the reverse of what was supposed to happen.”

Bowman added that the problems with abortion rates in Britain will continue “until ministers recognize the idiocy of these policies.”

Yesterday, ministers stated that rates were likely to decrease for 2008. Ministers said yesterday they believe abortions and conceptions among teenagers are set to fall.

“The trends in the data for 2008 and under-18 conception data for the first two quarters of 2008 give me confidence that we will see a return to the downward trend established between 1998 and 2006,” said Children’s Minister Dawn Primarolo.