Scotland Abortions Increase as Government Shows Britain Abortions Declining
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 26, 2009
London, England (LifeNews.com) — As government reports in England show the number of abortions declining, a new report from Scotland indicates abortions rose to an all-time high there. That’s despite aggressive promotion of the morning after pill, which abortion advocates say will reduce the number of abortions.
The latest figures for England and Wales showed a 1.6% drop in the number of abortions carried out in 2008, the first drop in three years and largest since 1999.
The new Scottish data shows there were 13,817 abortions in 2008, an increase of 79 on the previous year.
Almost 3,500 abortions were done on teenagers, with 343 done on girls under the age of 16. Women between the ages of 20 and 24, as is normally the case elsewhere, have the highest number of abortions in Scotland.
The highest rate in Scotland was in Tayside, while the lowest was in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. The highest rate was in Tayside, while the lowest was in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, the new report indicated.
As was the case in England and Wales, the new Scottish figures show the number of repeat abortions remains high, with 3,770 done on women who had already had at least one previous abortion. About 17.9 percent of abortions in NHS Borders were repeat abortions compared with 32 percent in NHS Tayside.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of the Scotland Catholic Church, was disappointed by the new numbers, saying they should "shame and debase us all," according to a BBC report.
"The 2008 abortion statistics confirm the abject failure of the so-called ‘sexual health strategy’ of recent years," he said.
"In 2007 I claimed that we kill the equivalent of a classroom full of school children every day and many objected to the vehemence of my language," he added. "Grotesquely, since then we have seen classroom sizes in Scotland fall and abortion numbers rise."
"Were this carnage to take place among children lucky enough to have been born our outrage would be boundless," he continued.
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