The number of abortions in England and Wales reached a record high in 2022, with a leading provider stating that women are facing “significant barriers” in access to contraception.
Almost three in 10 conceptions ended in legal abortions in the two nations in 2022, up from about two in 10 a decade earlier, according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The percentage of conceptions leading to legal abortion – which has been increasing for all age groups since 2015 – was 29.7% in 2022, up from 26.5% a year earlier and 20.8% in 2012. There were 247,703 conceptions leading to a legal abortion in 2022, a 13.1% rise on the 218,923 recorded in 2021.
Separate government figures relating to 2022 that were published last year showed the number of abortions for women living in England and Wales had risen by almost a fifth in a year. There were 251,377 abortions for women resident in the two nations in 2022, according to figures from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which was the highest since the Abortion Act was introduced almost 60 years ago and a rise of 17% on the 2021 figure.
Katherine O’Brien, from the British Pregnancy Advisory Services (Bpas), said women were struggling to access contraception as well as facing increasing financial pressures because of the cost of living crisis.
“Women are facing significant barriers when trying to access contraception, including long wait times and difficulties securing appointments,” she said. “At Bpas, we regularly hear from women who are seeking an abortion after falling pregnant while waiting for repeat pill prescriptions or coil insertions.”
A Bpas report last year found that 49% of women in the UK faced barriers to contraception, with long wait times posing a particular difficulty.
O’Brien added that interest rate hikes and increases in the cost of living in 2022 might also have forced couples to make “sometimes tough decisions around continuing or ending a pregnancy”.
“No woman should have to end a pregnancy she would otherwise have continued purely for financial reasons, and no woman should become pregnant because our healthcare system is failing to provide women with the contraception they want, when they need it,” she said.
The ONS figures show that girls under 16 remained the age group with the highest percentage of conceptions leading to abortion, at 61.0%, while women aged between 30 and 34 years old had the lowest percentage of conceptions leading to abortion in 2022, at about a fifth, or 20.5%.
Women in their early 30s were the age group with the highest number of conceptions, at 249,991. Women aged over 40 had a conception rate of 17.2 per 1,000 women in 2022, slightly below the record high of 17.3 per 1,000 women in 2021, according to the ONS.
O’Brien called on the government to reclassify emergency contraception to enable it to be sold in more places.
“Emergency contraception, while not a silver bullet to unplanned pregnancy rates, remains an underutilised resource in this country, with the majority of women not accessing this vital back-up method after an episode of unprotected sex,” she said.
“The government has committed to improving access via pharmacies, but we need to see this medication reclassified so that it can be sold in a wider range of outlets, including supermarkets, so that women can access it as swiftly as possible when needed.”