Type "abortion" into Google Images and you will conclude that my chosen image is mild.

The UK abortion law was introduced on the 27th of October in 1967 by David Steel. With this fact alone, many people would immediately conclude that this law is immoral and wrong but allow me a few sentences to explain why this law saved as many lives as it killed.

At the time, casual intercourse had become accepted and contraception research was not as advanced as it is today. As a result, the level of unwanted pregnancies augmented but there were no medical solutions nor was it socially accepted to abort your unborn child. From this, abortion on the black market became a popular service but sadly resulted in many women dying during this unsafe and unpracticed process. Unsurprisingly, orphanages and binned babies increased in number and parliament decided to introduce the abortion law which allowed a woman to abort their pregnancy within 28 weeks of gestation.

Unrelated to the above paragraph, Wikipedia statistics will tell you that in 2001 ten thousand women were raped and in 2002 three thousand more than previously in the UK. However in 2007, BBC reported a day before my birthday that 85,000 women had been raped but only 800 people convicted for rape crimes in that year. Either these 800 men are very quick or our justice system is rubbish but let’s pause for a moment. 85,000 women in a year – that’s one in two hundred women. I hope you are shaking your head in disgust too. Go to your Facebook friend list and take note that it is likely that someone on your friend list will be raped in the United Kingdom.

Putting the shock value aside, I would like to link the two together – becoming pregnant through rape. In the United States, 5% of rape victims under the age of 45 became pregnant resulting in 32,000 unplanned pregnancies that year. Would you have an abortion? Well you would probably be mad not to. Firstly conception outside of marriage never results in a positive upbringing but more importantly who would want to bare a child conceived in such a manner to a father of such evil. Would you have an abortion if it was against your religion? No religion out right bans abortion and that is true across the board of the major religions from Islam to Christianity – even Catholics, contrary to common misconception allow abortion.

Abortion in Today’s Society

In David Cameron’s manifesto he has pledged to lower the current abortion time limit from 24 weeks of pregnancy to 20 weeks. In 2007 nearly 200,000 women received an abortion in England and Wales where 38% were medical related, leaving 62% to unwanted children. More interestingly, 90% of these abortions took place within 13 weeks of gestation and 78% within 10 weeks. This shows that there are very few women who actually carry their child for more than three months who then decide they do not want it. So why is this reduction in abortion time allowance relevant?

Britain has the scar on its reputation of having teenage mums pushing around prams, holding a cigarette, on the way to the council to pick up their benefits. Whilst this policy may not reduce the number of abortions in numerical figures, it will play a psychological role in the morals that this country holds. Over the previous decade, the morals of the British have diminished severely and the quoted rape figures reiterates my statement. Don’t fall into it. Don’t become a common Brit that can be categorized as scum, who ruin your whole week just on sight of them. Our current coalition government show promise, and with their recent transparent motives, our nation cannot swoop any lower and the only way is up.

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