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MSI Reproductive Choices UK has opened a major new abortion facility in Birmingham, raising questions about why the abortion provider is investing in expanding surgical capacity when almost three-quarters of abortions in England and Wales are now carried out using pills at home.
The purpose-built abortion house contains two fully equipped operating rooms and will provide surgical abortions, including following a diagnosis of foetal anomaly. MSI also intends to use the facility as a national training centre for NHS and independent-sector abortion providers.
Richard Bentley, managing director of MSI Reproductive Choices UK, said the facility represented a “significant investment” that would expand abortion provision across the West Midlands and strengthen the workforce carrying out surgical abortions.
Yet official figures would suggest a dramatic move away from surgical abortion procedures in this country, but they don’t tell the full story.
In 2023, 87 per cent of abortions were medical, while 72 per cent of all abortions, 200,745, involved both abortion drugs being taken at home. This was 48,340 more home abortions than in 2022.
If abortion is increasingly being conducted at home, why is greater surgical capacity considered necessary? Surgical abortions declined for two decades, but began increasing again in 2022 and 2023, reaching 35,765. The total increase in abortions to over 270,000 in England and Wales have just swallowed up that growth in percentage.
MSI’s stated ambition to increase surgical capacity comes at precisely the moment that this previously shrinking part of the abortion industry has begun to grow again.
Their 2025 accounts also disclose preposterous executive remuneration. According to the organisation’s annual financial reporting, its CEO, Simon Cooke, received £507,975.
The organisation was formerly called Marie Stopes International but abandoned the name in 2020, embarrassed about their namesake’s eugenics advocacy.
Stopes advocated eugenic ideas about preventing people she considered “unfit” from reproducing. MSI claim that her views are in “stark contrast” with its stated values—that seems quite unlikely when looking at the nature of their business.
SPUC CEO, John Deighan, said: “The opening of this abortuary is a sign that the taxpayer-funded abortion industry in this country is planning expansion. Despite the decriminalisation of abortion up-to-birth, they have not given up and are planning to train-up the next generation of baby butchers to keep abortion figures rising here.”
He continued: “SPUC’s mission will always be one that destroys MSI’s goals: we will abolish abortion and make it unthinkable. Join SPUC in our Fightback Campaign.”
