Filthy Lucre: The UK’s Abortion Industry

K. V. TURLEY
The latest statistics for abortions in the United Kingdom have been made public by the Department of Health. The revised abortion figures released just days prior to Christmas show that in 2017 the numbers of UK abortions were at a ten-year high. The figures also unveil Britain’s culture of death and the money being made from it.

There were 197,533 abortions in 2017, which is 2,845 more than was originally reported by the government earlier last year.

The figures also tell a tale of the scale of the abortion industry here in the UK. The number of abortions performed by private abortion providers, but funded through taxpayers via the state-run National Health Service, reached a record high of 134,768. This figure represents 70 percent of all UK abortions, a rise from 68 percent in 2016.

Over the last 20 years this represents a 270 percent increase.

Disturbingly, this increase in UK abortions comes at a time when some private abortion providers have been accused by the UK government’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) of trying to persuade women to have abortions. A 2017 report from the CQC told of how Marie Stopes International (MSI), one of the UK’s biggest private abortion providers, was paying staff bonuses for encouraging women to undergo abortions.

Government inspectors found evidence of this policy at all 70 MSI UK facilities. The report also accused MSI staff of using high-pressure sales tactics, for example, calling women who had decided against having an abortion to offer them fresh appointments. The report also stated that those who might persuade an unsure pregnant women to think again before having an abortion—for example, parents, boyfriends, friends—were “seen as an inconvenience” by MSI staff and that “their presence was strongly discouraged.”

MSI is named after Marie Stopes. In her book, Radiant Motherhood (1920), Stopes states: “the sterilisation of those totally unfit for parenthood [should be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.” The following year she opened her first family planning centre in London and founded the “Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.” Its purpose was to prevent the birth of those whom she considered to be “the inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stopes admired Hitler. In 1935, she attended the Nazi-sponsored International Congress for Population Science in Berlin. On the eve of the Second World War, she sent the Führer a gushing letter with a copy of a slim volume of love poems she had composed.  A poem of hers from 1942 has this to say:

Catholics…
The Jews and the Russians,
All are a curse,
Or something worse…

Stopes died in 1958. In November 2018, it was announced that Stopes was one of those in the running to be honoured by having their face upon the UK’s latest £50 bank note.

Today Marie Stopes International is one of the world’s largest abortion providers with more than 12,000 employees in 37 countries. In its 2017 annual report, MSI revealed that its income was £296.1 million ($377 million USD). Approximately £157 million ($200 million USD) of this came via government funding and monies from other charitable bodies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (£8.4 million/$10.7 million USD) and from the United Nations (£3.3 million/$4.2 million USD). However, the largest single financial contribution to MSI came from the UK government’s Department for International Development, credited with giving £44 million ($56 million USD).

Regardless of whether Stopes is honoured with appearing on the latest £50 bank note the reality is that in the UK today abortion is a multi-million pound industry. So much so that the private abortion industry has a vested financial interest in increasing the number of unborn lives aborted. Vulnerable women have become a revenue opportunity for some, paid for out of public funds contributed to by the many.

The 2017 CQC report also found evidence of nearly 400 botched abortions at MSI facilities nationwide over a two-month period. In addition, in March 2017, an undercover reporter for the Daily Mail found doctors at MSI facilities approving thousands of abortions without meeting women and with some consultation discussions lasting just 22 seconds.

The profile of those seeking abortions is also telling. Although women seeking abortions were chiefly aged between 20- and 24-years old, the figures show that in past years the demand from this age group has been decreasing while at the same time it has risen among women aged over 30-years old. The abortion statistics for 2017 also show a rise in repeat abortions from 73,582 in 2016 up to 74,204 in 2017. In 2017, therefore, 38 percent of all UK abortions were repeat abortions. These figures fly in the face of much of the propaganda in favour of abortion provision portraying it as an unfortunate one-off last resort for teenage crisis pregnancies and the endlessly recited “hard cases”—rape and incest.

Another trend upwards is for what is known as “selective termination”—where one or more twins are aborted in the womb. In 2017, 111 twins or triplets were aborted in this way. The revised figures also revealed that over the last ten years the number of abortions for Down’s syndrome has increased by 50 percent. This comes at a time when British society is keen to appear inclusive to those with disabilities whether it is on public transport or in access to public buildings. Seemingly, this concern does not extend to those in the womb.

The MSI London abortion centre in Ealing was the second busiest in the UK with 7,558 abortions performed there; this represented an increase from 6,484 in 2016. This abortion facility came to national prominence earlier last year. In April 2018, the London Borough of Ealing became the first UK Local Authority to enforce what is termed a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) for the area around the Ealing abortion facility to “to protect women from distress and intimidation” on their way into the abortion centre, and thereby banning pro-life witness and offers of practical and emotional support outside the facility.

What the media reported with less fanfare was the fact that on May 1, 2018, a London coroner criticized repeated failures at the Ealing facility following the death of a woman, who in 2012 had died in a taxi after having undergone an abortion at the Ealing MSI centre. Subsequent to the woman’s death, a doctor and two nurses attached to the same facility were charged and then later acquitted of manslaughter.

The PSPO in place in Ealing not only prohibits peaceful witness outside the facility but also specifically any prayer near it. This is ironic given the history of the building in question. It was once an Anglo-Catholic convent. For years, a group of devout Christian women prayed in its chapel, in what was a place of healing for troubled souls; later, it was to become a maternity home. In short, the building’s current use is the very antithesis of what it once was.

Another London abortion facility at Richmond, where 5,877 abortions took place in 2017, was once a convent run by a Catholic order of nuns, the Daughters of the Immaculate. Within the building there was a chapel where they celebrated Holy Mass. Today, a very different sacrifice takes place there.

In today’s Britain, Christmas is hailed as the only festival most people, regardless of religious affiliation or not, celebrate in one form or another. At this time of year, even in secular Britain, pictures of the Madonna and Child can be found everywhere. Recent figures show that the average Sunday attendance at Church of England (Anglican) services is approximately 760,000; at Christmas the figures recorded for those attending Anglican church services surge to 2.6 million.

These latest abortion figures, however, reveal something of the hypocrisy at the heart of a British society that “loves” Christmas but callously disregards or simply ignores the thousands of pregnant mothers and their unborn children who each year become yet more victims of abortion in Britain’s ongoing culture of death.