Abortion in Britain

Last month saw the end of the first year of operation of the Abortion Act in Britian, and statistics are now available for the first 10 months, from April 1968, to February 1969. In that time, legal, notified abortions totalled 28,849, of which 20,746 were on the grounds of risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the women. A further 1350 were carried out because of risk to the life of the woman, 1137 because of risk to the physical or mental health of existing children, 965 because of the risk of the woman bearing a physically or mentally handicapped child, and 52 as emergencies to save the life of the woman or prevent grace injury to her health. Another 4599 abortions were carried out for more than 1 of these reasons. An earlier set of statistics, covering the period up to December 1968, showed that 22,256 abortions legally carried out up to then, 13,609 were in National Health Service hospitals and 8601 in other approved hospitals. It is likely that the total number of legal abortions in Britain for the first full year of the Act will be about 34,000. In the years leading up to the introduction of the Abortion Act, the number of abortions carried out in Britain for reasons then legal had been growing steadily, and had reached 7600 in National Health Service hospitals in 1967. An unknown further number of legal abortions had been done in private nursing homes - these cannot be computed because they were not notifiable before the Abortion Act came into force. There are 4 legal abortions for every 100 live births in Britain; this is about 1/2 the figure for Denmark and one tenth that of Czechoslovakia.