How many of your friends have had an abortion? We’re gonna guess at one or two, based on anecdotal evidence, but mostly on recent figures from Marie Stopes UK who carried out 65,000 abortions last year. Okay, now how many people do you know who’ve had more than one abortion? Suddenly everyone’s gone quiet.
Because despite us now talking openly about abortion – it’s just as likely to come up over burgers and cocktails as how skint you are, your last Tinder date or Kim Kardashian – nobody seems to want to talk about the second one. Or the third. Or the fourth. Given that more than a quarter of the women under 25 having abortions have already had at least one before, why do we stop talking about them after the first?
We’re gonna hazard a guess that it’s the problematic way mainstream press has been bandying around the term ‘repeat abortion’. You’ll have seen the headlines. Yup, repeat abortions is a thing. And it’s shaming us into silence.
‘We need to challenge this term “repeat abortions”,’ insists Audrey Simpson, acting CEO of the FPA. ‘It’s very judgmental. It suggests women are going out and having an abortion every year, which is not the fact. If you have an abortion at 18 and you have one at 28, it’s hardly a repeat abortion, it means that you’ve had more than one abortion in ten years.’
That explains the uncomfy feeling we get that it’s a case of one-strike-and-you’re-out when it comes to abortion. Because while we’re finally being allowed to have the conversation, there are still supposed limits on our freedom of choice. To which we say, bollocks. After all, accidents happen. News flash: SOMETIMES MORE THAN ONCE!
This morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, a young woman adopting the name ‘Lisa’ used the voice of an actress to explain why she has now had four abortions. And really, we can’t have been the only ones feeling sad when she justified it with, ‘I was really careless. I can’t blame anyone else, not the guy, it’s down to me because I know what I’m doing, but I should have been more responsible because I’ve killed a life now and it wasn’t that baby’s fault. It’s because of my careless actions – I should have thought about who I was sleeping with before I did it.’
But should she? As Audrey explains, ‘I think that women who decide to have an abortion, the vast majority of them agonise over the decision, it's a very difficult decision for them to make, but they are at a particular point in their lives where they feel that they could not continue with the pregnancy.’
And as for reports that young women are simply using abortion as a form of contraception, umm – oversimplifying it, much? Again, over to Audrey: ‘I’ve worked in this area for many years and I have to say I have never met a woman yet who has used abortion as a method of contraception. That would be extremely rare. I think the press sometimes sensationalises it.’
Maybe the new figures are less about the numbers of abortions and more about the fact that we have better access to services. Let’s not forget that there’s a whole bundle of reason one might choose to terminate a pregnancy – and that’s not something you can just collate in the latest black and white survey, people.
For ‘Lisa’, who had her first abortion at 18, she went ahead with her second pregnancy and her daughter was born when she was 20. She went on to have another abortion at 21 and her third and fourth last year, aged 22. Two of the terminations resulted from brief relationships, the other when she was in a relationship with a man who was drinking and jobless. And like 80% of women, Lisa doesn’t regret her choices.
‘I would never do anything if I was going to regret it later or feel ashamed afterwards,’ she told Radio 4. ‘I did what was best for me and my daughter at the time – I don’t want to be stuck with three or four kids with three or four different dads.’
So what’s the reality behind the over-hyped headlines about having more than one abortion? ‘Lisa’ said: ‘The first one you don’t know what’s going to happen – you’ve never been there before so you’re scared, anxious, not sure whether people are going to judge you at the clinic. But then once you’ve done it and see all the other women there it doesn’t make you feel that bad. It does get easier the more you have. I know that sounds really bad. But that’s just how it is.’
For the FPA and other women’s health charities, the worry is less about the number of abortions women are having and more about the education we’re *not *having. Were you ever told at school how to put a condom on? We weren’t.
‘A lot of young people aren’t,’ says Audrey. ‘I think the most worrying thing about this research is the lack of knowledge about emergency contraception – we now have emergency contraception that can be taken up to five days after unprotected sex. SRE in some schools is failing young people, and now that commissioning for sexual health charities has gone down to local level, we need to make sure that it doesn’t get lost. It’s absolutely crucial that young people are given good, accurate and impartial advice on contraception.’
She recommends swinging by your local specialist family planning clinic for well-versed advice and the best range of contraceptive methods.
And while the onus of unwanted pregnancy still seems to fall on women (umm, what about the men??), maybe we should forget the figures for a bit and remember that as long as there is sex (clue: there will always be sex), there will always be a need for abortion services.
As Audrey says, ‘In every country in the world, women have always had abortions – there’s never been a time where they haven’t. And until we get a method of contraception that’s 100% effective, which we don’t have, and until people are fully knowledgeable about their options, there will always be somebody who has an unplanned pregnancy.’ We love Audrey.
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.