LONDON, May 26, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The most recent available statistics from England and Wales show that eugenic abortions have risen by ten percent in the past year.
The 2010 statistics, published by the Department of Health this week, also found that unmarried girls are overwhelmingly more likely to abort their children than married women, with 81 percent of abortions carried out on single women. For every two abortions carried out on married women, 11 children of unmarried women were killed by abortion.
Paul Tully, general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), commented: “The annual abortion statistics tell a tragic story of avoidable death – driven by commercial interests and sexual exploitation of women.
“The abortion industry and the Department of Health abet the anti-life culture by promoting the idea that sex – and abortion – must be available to everyone on demand.”
Despite the slight drop from 2009, the abortion rate in England and Wales has climbed steadily overall since the practice was legalized in 1967.
The report notes that 2,290 abortions, about 1 percent, were carried out under “Ground E,” or in cases where the child was suspected of having a handicap, in 2010, a rise of around 10 percent over 2009, when 2,085 disabled babies were aborted; the average for Ground E over the last 5 years has been under 2000.
There were also 85 abortions that involved “selective terminations,” that is, the killing of one or more children in the womb while leaving a twin alive. The practice, also commonly called “selective reduction,” was done in 51 cases. Seventy-eight percent of these were committed under ground E.
Attempts in Parliament in 1990 to lower the gestational age limit for abortion backfired when the change was allowed but only at the expense of disabled children. The age limit was lowered marginally from 28 to 24 weeks, but all restriction on eugenic abortion was lifted; now children suspected of suffering even mild disabilities can be killed legally up to the point of full gestation.
The total number of abortions for England and Wales was 189,574 in 2010, a 0.3 percent increase over 2009 and an 8 percent increase since 2000. The overall rate of abortion for women resident in England and Wales aged 15-44 was 17.5 per 1,000, which the report notes is more than double the 1970 rate of 8.0 per 1000.
Young women are especially at risk of abortion, with 33 abortions per 1,000 for women between 19 and 20. There has been a slight drop in the number of abortions conducted on teenaged girls, with 3.9 per 1000 for under-16s and 16.5 per 1000 for under-18s. This is compared with 2009 rates of 4.0 per 1000 and 17.6 per 1000 respectively.
Ninety-six percent of abortions were funded by the NHS, with 59 percent being contracted out to private abortionist organizations like Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.
The number of so-called “medical” abortions, those carried out by the use of the drug RU-486, is also growing, constituting 43 percent of abortions, up from 12 percent in 2000.