Abortion Techniques

There are a number of techniques used to carry out abortions.

The methods of abortion used in Great Britain include vacuum aspiration, dilation and evacuation (D&E), and medical abortion. The morning after pill (so-called emergency contraception) and intra-uterine devices (the coil) can also cause early abortions but the numbers are unknown and are not listed in the abortion statistics¹. Unborn children also die in the process of in vitro fertilisation treatment², and the conventional birth control pill may sometimes act as an abortifacient³.

RU-486, also known as Mifepristone or Mifegyne, was licensed for use in Britain by the Department of Health in 1991 and is used in abortions up to nine weeks. It blocks the effects of the natural hormone progesterone, which maintains the lining of the uterus during pregnancy. RU-486 causes the uterine lining to detach, along with the developing unborn child. RU-486 is used with a prostaglandin, which dilates the cervix and expells the child. Ru486 it also used in medical abortion from 12 weeks onwards and is the most common type of late abortion in Britain.

Vacuum aspiration (also known as endometrial aspiration) is the most commonly used surgical abortion technique in Britain, and is used in pregnancies between 7 and 15 weeks. The cervix (neck of the womb) is dilated and a tube connected to a suction pump is inserted into the womb. The baby and placenta are then sucked out of the womb with 10 times the force of an ordinary vacuum cleaner. The suction pump is connected to a jar and its contents are checked to ensure that the abortion is complete. The procedure is often completed with curettage, or scraping out of the womb, to remove any remaining foetal parts. In the early stages of pregnancy the embryo can be sucked out via a cannula, or tube, of only six or eight millimetres diameter without general anaesthetic.

D&E is carried out under general or local anaesthetic. It is commonly used for pregnancies from 16 weeks onwards. In D&E the use of surgical implements such as grasping forceps is combined with suction to remove the unborn child. An instrument like a pair of pliers is needed for D&E abortions as the bones have started to calcify and the skull is too large to be removed without crushing it.

Abortion Statistics: The Tragic Facts

An analysis of 21 years of abortion statistics in Britain (1968-1989) carried out for the SPUC Educational Research Trust⁴ revealed that the typical candidate for abortion under the 1967 Act was young, single and childless, the very type of case for which MPs had been assured in 1967 that abortion would not be available. Abortion figures for 2004 tell exactly the same story.

In Scotland in 2004 provisional figures indicated that 309 girls under 16 had abortions (2.35 percent of the total). A total of 3215 abortions (25.8 percent) were carried out on teenagers and 5967 abortions (47.9 percent) were carried out on women in their 20s. 29.7 percent of abortions (3700) were performed on women aged between 20 and 24, the most likely age for abortion, as in England.

The number of recorded abortions in Britain has risen both in absolute numbers, and per head of the population (women aged 15-44) since the Abortion Act came into effect on 27 April 1968⁵. The total number of induced abortions recorded for residents and non-residents in Scotland in 1969 was 3,556. By 1971, this figure had risen to 6,333, and by 1973 it had reached 7,542. 1998 saw 12,485 registered abortions in Scotland, the largest number ever. The provisional figures for 2004 indicate 12,448 abortions, the largest number since 1998.

The number of abortions dipped in the years 1975-1977 mainly due to a sharp drop in abortions on non-residents. An analysis of official government statistics indicates that between 27 April 1968 and 31 December 2003, there were a total of 6,024,406 abortions performed in England, Wales and Scotland under the Act. This figure is growing by about 200,000 per year. There are more than 500 abortions every day in Britain, this represents in Scotland about 33 per day and about 1,000 per month.

There are tens of millions of induced abortions across the world each year. There is no reliable, authoritative estimate of the annual number of abortions worldwide.

The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has estimated that there are 46 million abortions each year, which equates to about 22 percent of the total number of recorded pregnancies⁶. However, this figure includes 20 million "illegal" abortions which have always been largely inflated in the past.

Most abortions in Britain are performed on the statutory ground that ‘continuance of pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman’. The liberal interpretation of this has meant that abortion is effectively available on demand⁷. In Scotland in 2004, 95.7 percent of abortions were carried out on this ground.

Much less than one percent of abortions have been performed in an emergency, to save the mother’s life or to prevent grave permanent injury to her health.

1 Both the morning-after pill and the coil can work by impeding the successful implantation of a newly conceived human being in the endometrium, or lining of the womb.
2 Dr E L Billings estimated in 1999 that only 1.7 percent of conceptions generated by IVF treatment result in a live birth.
3 See A Consumer’s Guide to the Pill and other drugs, John Wilks, TGB Books, Australia, 1996
4 Robert Whelan (ed.), Legal Abortion Examined: 21 years of Abortion Statistics, SPUC Educational Research Trust, London, 1992
5 Abortion statistics for England and Wales are provided by the Office for National Statistics, and for Scotland by the Information and Statistics Division of the Common Services Agency for the NHS.
6 Estimates of the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute, reported by Fox News, 21 January 1999
7 The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists observed in Unplanned Pregnancy (1972): "There is no such danger of injury in the majority of these cases as the ‘indication’ is purely a social one." In a 1988 Gallup poll of British gynaecologists, 85% of respondents said that there was abortion on demand in British state hospitals.

Adapted from 'A Way of Life' The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children March 2002

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