The real cost of abortions is much more than money

Updated figures from the Department of Health, reported recently in The Telegraph, which reveal that taxpayers spent £118 million on abortions in the year 2010 alone, with £75 million going straight to private clinics, have sparked yet more calls for the need to break the link of financial interest between private abortion providers and the pre-abortion counselling service that they offer. While LIFE shares the understandable dismay and alarm that taxpayers are paying millions more than previously thought to private clinics to carry out abortions on behalf of the NHS, LIFE is also concerned about the hidden costs associated with abortion: the cost of every life lost in abortion, the cost to the health of women and the cost to society as it loses sight of the value of human life and motherhood.

Statistics for 2010 showed that 1 in 3 abortions are repeat abortions. Whilst this may be indicative of an increasingly casual attitude to abortion and the cheapness of human life, it may also be attributable to the impact of the abortion itself. Joanne Hill, spokesperson for the charity LIFE says: ‘In LIFE's many years of counselling women following an abortion, LIFE knows how some women can get trapped in a cycle of compensatory pregnancy following an abortion. Feelings of unworthiness of being a mother because of a previous abortion can lead to yet another abortion, and so on'.

Complex behaviour patterns such as these, which are known to psychologists and counsellors, highlight the essential role to be played by pre-abortion counselling. And with mounting scientific evidence of an association between abortion and mental health problems, the latest review of which was published in the prestigious British Journal of Psychiatry this September, which claims that nearly 10% of all mental health problems in women of childbearing age could be attributable to abortion, it is vital that women are offered free counselling prior to making a decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Unless policy makers take action to put concrete measures in place to reduce abortion rates in this country, such as a mandatory offer of counselling, the cost of abortion, whether financial, social or personal, will just keep mounting, something we cannot afford to let happen.