Statistics released by the British government this week show a tragic rise in abortions among young women.
Referred to by one researcher as “the Tinder Generation,” women ages 16 to 34 had the highest rate of abortions in almost three decades in 2017, according to the report by the British Office for National Statistics. The statistics involve England and Wales.
The Telegraph reports women in their early 20s aborted one third of their unborn babies in 2017, a nearly 2-percent increase from 2016. Abortions also rose to their highest since 1990, according to the report.
Women ages 30 to 39 had 59,956 abortions in 2017, while teens under 18 had 7,929 abortions, according to the data.
While the percentage of pregnancies ending in abortions increased, the number of pregnancies themselves decreased by 1.8 percent, the report found. More than half of those pregnancies (58.7 percent) occurred outside of marriage.
British health expert Jackie Doyle-Price recently blamed dating apps like Tinder for contributing to the increase in unplanned pregnancies, the report states.
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“We’re laughing and talk about the Tinder generation now, but what tends to happen is you have women leaving one relationship and then playing the field again, entering the market again,” she told a women’s health recent.
“That’s actually when unplanned pregnancy tends to happen. There’s an education point there which is please continue to look after your fertility,” Doyle-Price continued.
Meanwhile, the statistics indicate that contraception usage also fell 1.5 percent in the same period.
Some good news did come out of the report. According to Yahoo News, the number of teenage pregnancies fell 1.8 percent among young women under 18 in 2017.
The biggest drop was among girls under 16, at 10.8 percent, the report found. The same age group was the only age group where the percentage of abortions also fell.
There were 194,668 abortions in 2017 in England and Wales, a 2.3 percent increase from 2016, according to the latest government statistics. Almost all abortions in the UK are taxpayer-funded.
