Recent statistics on abortion: UK

On 6 October 2014, the House of Commons Library published its latest Statistics on abortion, (Standard Note SN04418), which

“presents statistics on abortion in England & Wales, as well as Scotland. Numbers of abortions and rates per 1,000 women aged 15-44 are provided and a brief time series is presented. The period of gestation when the abortion took place is also considered as well as the method of abortion”.

Whilst this 6-page summary will be helpful as an aide memoire for parliamentarians seeking the basic statistics, which is after all its raison d’être[1], others with an interest in the area will find it contains only limited interpretation of the data, and provides no links to the more comprehensive information that is available for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

[The Standard Note was updated on 14 March 2016, the revised version of which is here. However, the following discussion relates to the data included in the 2014 Note, which also bears the same report number, 04418]

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