King Herod hard at work in the UK

Briefing.

From CFNews: The number of women having an abortion in England and Wales exceeded 200,000 for the first time last year.

There has been an increased figure almost every year since the legalisation of abortion in 1967 - and the indications are this year's figure will be even higher.

Britain's termination rate is already the highest in Western Europe, and if trends continue it will bypass the U.S. within a decade as the place where the greatest proportion of births are terminated.

The shocking figures came just months after MPs rejected moves to restrict abortion to under 20 weeks only, in a bid to call a halt to the year-on-year rises.

The limit for social abortions stayed at 24 weeks.

Pro-life MPs say the figures prove that abortion has become so commonplace that hundreds of women are using it as a form of contraception.

Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid Bedfordshire, said: 'Abortion is wrongly seen as an easy and trouble-free way of ending a pregnancy. It has moved from a resource that women turn to in an emergency and a point of crisis to becoming a form of contraception.
'This has been brought about as a result of an ill-conceived notion that it is just a minor procedure with no side or lasting effects, but this is not the case.'

The Office for National Statistics has revealed that there were 205,600 abortions last year, with 198,500 carried out on Britons and the rest on women who had travelled from other countries.

There were more than 200,000 abortions in Britain in 2007 - but there could be even more in 2008.

Most abortions - 57,000 - were carried out on the 20 to 24 age group. However, there were 4,400 on the under-16s and 700 on those aged more than 45. Some 62.7 per cent of abortions were performed within nine weeks.

In the first six months of 2008, there were 105,000 abortions, slightly more than half last year's figure, indicating the annual total is likely to exceed that of 2007.

Pro-life campaigners are also becoming increasingly concerned with the number of repeat abortions.

The most recent figures for this from 2006 show that nearly 4,000 women have had four or more abortions - and dozens have had eight or more. There were 82 teenagers on their third abortion.

Overall, the number of women having repeat abortions has reached record levels. In 2006, 59,687 abortions were performed in England on women who had already had one.

A third of terminations are now repeats, and the number has gone up by 5 per cent in two years.