Antonia Tully, blogpost.

One of Britain’s biggest abortion providers has released figures, published in the New Statesman,  apparently showing that the risks for women having early medical abortions have decreased since DIY abortions were introduced in March 2020.

BPAS is claiming that, for example, the overall risk of major complications is down from 0.9% to 0.3%. The overall risk of minor complications, according to them, is down 3.20% to 1.96%. The risk of haemorrhage requiring blood transfusion is down 0.7% to 0.2%. And so on.

But what are these figures really showing us?   

Critically, DIY abortions are designed to be unsupervised and unmonitored. If a woman is attending a clinic for her abortion, complications will obviously be seen more readily. But hidden away at home, who sees what happens?

Here at SPUC we have repeatedly stressed the dangers of home abortions, including women not calculating the gestation of the pregnancy accurately or not adhering to the strict time intervals for taking the two doses of the abortion drugs. And that’s before you take into account isolated, panicking women aborting their own baby in the toilet who may not realise whether they are experiencing complications or not.

Couple this with figures which show that during 2020, every month a million fewer people (which would include women with complications following a DIY abortion) were seeing their GP compared to 2019[1] and we start to get a clearer picture of what the BPAS figures might actually be telling us.

What we are probably seeing in the BPAS figures is that fewer women are going to their GP or hospital with complications, which doesn’t mean that women are actually experiencing fewer complications from home abortions.

Katherine O’Brien, associate director of communications and campaigns at BPAS is claiming in the “New Statesman”, that taking the two abortion pills at home makes it more likely that women are going to take the drugs at the correct interval and that receiving the pills by post means that the abortions can take place earlier in the pregnancy.

Sorry, but Katherine’s neat little world simply doesn’t tally with the findings of a mystery client investigation by Christian Concern. This investigation exposed BPAS and two other abortion providers sending out no less than 26 DIY abortion packs to 26 women each of whom gave a false name, the name of a GP surgery where they were not registered and a fake medical history and gestational age. In reality, abortion providers are sending out DIY abortion kits and they have no idea who is using them. Or how they are being used. Figures purporting to show that home abortions are safer are now starting to look dodgy to say the least. 

Nor does Katherine’s vision of home abortion take into account the vulnerable and abused women who are particularly at risk from the dangers of DIY abortions.

The rise in domestic violence during the Covid-19 pandemic is now well documented[2]. Controlling, abusive men are having a field day with DIY abortions enabling them to cover their tracks. How many women coerced into having an abortion and too frightened or restricted to get help if something goes wrong, are showing up in the BPAS figures?

I may be wrong, but I detect a note of desperation in the BPAS figures, which, incidentally, appear not to have been widely picked up by the press. Probably because, scratch the surface and these percentages smack of little more than pro-abortion propaganda. 

What BPAS is telling me is that safety is the big issue here. We have plenty of evidence that DIY abortion is not safe. Now is the time to let out the truth.