Apparently, the rejection in parliament of a change in the upper cutoff date for abortions is not the beginning of the end for the abortion debate, to borrow a phrase from Churchill, but the end of the beginning.
In my last post I put up a graphic from the BBC which had some pretty interesting data on it. Here’s some more. All data is from the ONS Report on Abortion which has data up to 2006 (plus the first two quaters of 2007, but I didn’t use them in the graphs). Unlike the BBC graph previously, I’ve used a linear scale for the years, every 5 years since 1971, which is the first set of data points. There’s also an ONS document on Calculation of Abortion Rates (PDF) which explains one or two of the mathematical intricacies of the numbers. Throughout, Click on an image to get a larger version.
We’ll start with an easy one, raw abortion levels in thousands (among UK residents), and abortion rate per thousand women UK residents.
Naturally, the trend is up and up, but equally the population is rising. Next up, abortions by the age of the mother. Nothing really unexpected here, under 16 and over 45 have a very low showing. I was surprised, though, to see 20-24 yr olds having a much higher share than the later ages.
This suggests to me a lot of women deciding to abort a pregnancy while they are young, with the implicit hope of having a baby later in life. This modern trend is easier to see in the graphic showing the age distribution of mother’s ages across a number of years:
This ‘young mother’s abortions’ trend seems to have peaked in the early nineties, but is still very prevalent nowadays and in marked contrast to the 70’s.
Lastly, I’ve got a repeat of the BBC graph, but with exact information and some extra years included:
The first thing that’s very interesting is that the 20+ weeks rate grew through the 70’s and 80’s, but has remained pretty constant at ~1.5% ever since (it actually peaks at 1.6% from 2001-2004, then down a little from there). The BBC graphic does look a little like it’s increasing, but that’s mostly due to the paucity of data points that they use.
I think the most important thing that is clear from the graph, though, is that the standard time for getting an abortion is moving earlier in the pregnancy. Evidently, for what is probably a variety of reasons, women are proactively choosing to have abortions earlier on in their pregnancies, so that a whopping 89% of abortions happen within the first 12 weeks of the pregnancy, and more than half occured in the first 9 weeks.
Anyway, I hope this is a useful resource for anyone wanting to know more about abortion rates and so on. Let me know in the comments if there are any specific pieces of further data you’d like to see…
UPDATE:
I’ll keep adding interesting facts as I come across them. First up, legal abortions in 2006 as a percentage of conceptions. This is from a different data set – Conception Statistics (2006 Provisional) so some of the breakdowns are different, in particular the age groupings. Again, we see a markedly higher rate among those in their early 20’s, dipping to its lowest in the 30-34 group. This 30-34 age group has the second highest number of conceptions (behind the 25-29s) and the lowest percentage of abortions, so it’s fairly safe to deduct that this is the most common age for new mothers!
There’s much more detailed data on the under 20’s group, but I think the overall spread is more interesting. Suffice to say, the younger you go, the lower the conception rate and the higher the percentage of conceptions leading to abortion. Among 14 year olds, there were 1,759 conceptions, and 65.9% of these ended up with an abortion. I’ve also dug up the number of conceptions, broken down by mother’s age, across the last 20 years, which is below:
This shows that mothers are, in a very general sense, getting older when they have children – though of course there’s no specific information on how many children they already have. Conceptions over the age of 35 are steadily increasing, it must be said. Last word on conceptions, since it doesn’t really have that much to do with abortion, is the total number of conceptions over the last nearly-30 years:
Thanks Stu, for the effort you’ve put into this post.
I’ve had a quick look only at your source data but will return to it later, to see if anything more can be gleaned.
I’ll concentrate on your pie chart for now, since I can’t agree at this stage with your comment: “This suggests to me a lot of women deciding to abort a pregnancy while they are young, with the implicit hope of having a baby later in life.”
You would need to obtain the figures of live births for the same age groups, and over the same time period and analyse comparatively. Also, I note the age ranges of females are not uniform but that’s how the original data has been grouped, so not much you can do about that unless ONS make the absolute raw data available.
I am surprised that there is roughly an equal split between the aggregated age groups of up to 24s, and over 24s, and that the 30+ age group make up nearly a third, a substantially bigger number than teenagers. Again, I would like to see the live birth rate for comparison.
Is there any time-series data on choice of contraceptive equipment, to coin a phrase, and the efficacy of each? Ditto for all females in England and Wales (I note the original data is based on these two parts of the UK only) and the absolute numbers in each age group.
As I say, I’ll look at the initial data more closely later but I’m annoyed at the way the ONS has cleaned it.
Tiz
Tizzy
May 22, 2008 at 2:49 pm