Greg DalyThe number of Irish women seeking abortions in Britain continues to drop, Greg Daly discovers
At first glance, the latest abortion statistics from Britain might appear to suggest that Ireland is facing a unique public health crisis, for which abortion is – as certain advocates of wider abortion access might claim – the only possible solution. Such a conclusion would be very wrong.
In principle if not in practice, abortion is illegal in Britain, as section 58 of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, repealed in Ireland in 2013, remains in force throughout the UK. Under the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act, doctors who have performed abortions are excused from prosecution only if at least one of seven criteria is met; in theory, doctors who perform abortions without meeting these criteria could be sentenced to penal servitude for life, as could any woman who procured such an abortion.
According to Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2015, of the 3,451 abortions performed in that jurisdiction last year on women with addresses in the Republic of Ireland, 135 were ‘Ground E’ abortions, with the remaining 3,316 being ‘Ground A’ abortions.
Ground E abortions are excused in British law on the basis of “a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical and mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”, whereas Ground A abortions are permitted when “the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated”.
It would be very easy, then, to skim the newly-published abortion statistics and conclude that abortion is now a medical necessity in Ireland, as thousands of Irish women are depending on Britain to remove serious risks to their lives. It would be easy, but it would also be lazy and thoughtless. Is it really likely, after all, that in a year when there were just 88 Ground A abortions performed on women from England and Wales, there were 3,316 performed on women from Ireland?
Simple error
A separate table within the report suggests that, instead, a simple error has been made. According to this, of the 5,190 abortions performed in England and Wales on women from outside that jurisdiction, 96% were Ground C abortions, these being abortions where “the pregnancy has not exceeded its 24th week and the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman”.
It seems, then, that in one table the 3,316 Ground C abortions performed on Irish women were wrongly classed as Ground A ones. That almost all Irish abortions in Britain were Ground C abortions is in line with British trends, which show, as in previous years, that 98% of abortions for women with English or Welsh addresses were Ground C abortions.
Almost all – 99.95% – of these Ground C abortions were on mental health grounds, with no breakdown of the types of mental health issues being offered. The legality of abortions such as these has, however, increasingly been in question.
The supposed justification for them is that the continuation of pregnancy poses a risk to a woman’s mental health greater than an abortion would pose. The Royal College of Surgeon’s most recent evidence-based set of guidelines for the care of women requesting abortions direct that “women with an unintended pregnancy should be informed that the evidence suggests that they are no more or less likely to suffer adverse psychological sequelae whether they have an abortion or continue with the pregnancy and have the baby”.
Crisis
If women facing crisis pregnancies are no more likely to suffer adverse psychological effects if they continue with their pregnancies rather than having abortions, it is difficult to see how the continuance of the pregnancy could be deemed to involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to their mental health. It may well be, therefore, that almost all abortions in Britain – including almost all Irish abortions there – are in contravention of UK law.
More positively, however, after a slight upwards bump in 2014, the number of abortions performed on women with addresses in the Republic of Ireland last year has resumed the downwards trend since numbers peaked 15 years earlier. Last year’s 3,451 such abortions was just slightly over half the 6,625 performed in 2001, and lower than any year on record since 1980.
Although it is occasionally argued that this trend reflects improvements in sex education in Ireland, it’s hard to see how those taking this line square this with the fact that English and Welsh abortion rates have – far from halving – risen by over 5% over the same period, unless they believe sex education is conspicuously better in Ireland than across the Irish Sea.
Indeed, 2015 saw the highest number of abortions in England and Wales since 2011; only seven years since the introduction of the 1967 Abortion Act have seen more abortions than last year’s 185,824.
The statistics give a host of other data sets, revealing, for instance, that over the 10 years from 2006 to 2015, abortion rates declined among all Irish age groups, according to the data, with the exception of women aged over 35. Instead, we see that over that period, in the 35-39 age group abortions rose by almost a quarter from 491 to 603, while for women over 40 abortions rose by almost half, rising from 200 to 292.
As problems with pregnancies are more commonly associated with older maternal age, these figures may go some way to explaining why 4% of Irish abortions are Ground E ones, compared to the 2% that is the norm across England and Wales. More research is clearly needed on this point.
Importantly, this year’s statistics include a table breaking down the 135 abortions that took place on what is known as the ‘disability ground’, revealing that 40 abortions took place because the children had Down Syndrome, 13 because of Edwards Syndrome, seven because of Patau Syndrome, and nine because of spina bifida.
The report also revealed that of the abortions for people with Irish addresses, 19% were for married women or women in civil partnerships, with 46% being for women in relationships without formal state recognition, and 28% for single people not in relationships. 19% of Ireland-based women seeking abortions had previously had at least one abortion in England or Wales, compared to 38% of those giving English or Welsh addresses.
Predictably, the Irish county from which most women seeking abortions came was Dublin, with 41% of women seeking abortions coming from there.
All 3,451 Irish abortions were privately funded, rather than being paid for by the State.