Date published: 2006/05/29
The BBC says:
A record 10,000 women had an abortion at home last year, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service has said.
It said nearly one-third of the 32,000 terminations it provided in the first nine weeks of pregnancy had been "medical" - involving abortion drugs.
The BPAS described the trend as a "success" for sexual health, but campaign groups have been critical.
Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) accused the BPAS of "deeply insensitive self-promotion" of abortions.
The "abortion pill" is only used in the first nine weeks of pregnancy - later, only surgical termination is allowed.
...
Ann Furedi, chief executive of the BPAS, the UK's biggest independent provider of abortions, said demand for the pills had taken off over the past two to three years - since the service started allowing women to go home after the second dose.In 2003 BPAS clinics gave 3,500 women early medical abortions (EMAs), but this rose to 5,000 in 2004 and doubled to 10,000 in 2005, the highest ever.
...
A £1m government investment into selected NHS primary care trusts had enabled them to improve early access to abortions, she added, making BPAS the biggest provider of EMA in Europe.
...
But Pressure group Comment on Reproductive Ethics (Core) called BPAS's "trumpeting" its role in the 10,000 abortions "deeply insensitive self-promotion"."Every rational person, no matter what his or her stance on the rights of the unborn child, has to agree that the ideal for any woman and the health of any nation is fewer, or better still no, abortions," a spokeswoman said.
"BPAS, instead, cannot seem to get enough - the UK figures continue to rise and the government does nothing constructive about it."
Michaela Aston, a spokeswoman for anti-abortion organisation Life, told the Times newspaper mifepristone had been responsible for at least 10 women dying.
Of course if you offer women a better kind of abortion service they are bound to take it up in increasing numbers. So this just seems to be a propaganda exercise on behalf of BPAS (the BBC provides lots of airtime for such propaganda from allegedly worthy organisations). But the anti-abortion brigade are worse. If "no abortions" is an ideal for the nation then an even bigger ideal is no unwanted children. And it's so touching that the anti-abortion brigade are allegedly so concerned about the fact that this drug might kill some women. Of course what they are really concerned about is abortion, not women. And almost every drug kills somebody, the question is whether the good outweighs the bad.
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