Esmond Birnie: Liberalisation has indeed led to an outrageous increase in Northern Ireland annual abortions
During the years between 1967 and 2019 when Northern Ireland’s abortion law was much stricter than that in Great Britain it was often claimed by pro-abortion campaigners that this particular social policy situation was fundamentally dishonest.
Such supporters of liberalisation of the law in Northern Ireland tended to argue that Northern Ireland did indeed have an “abortion problem” but it had been disguised through in effect exporting it to Great Britain: women seeking abortions took the boat to Liverpool or the plane to London.
The issue was out of sight and out of mind. It was therefore argued that Northern Ireland needed to at the very least replicate the liberal provisions of the 1967 Act in Great Britain and then abortions could be performed legally in Northern Ireland with less hurt and inconvenience to the women involved.
Some of us never found this argument convincing. Northern Ireland’s pre-2019 abortion laws were strict and they did partly reflect the prevalence of relatively conservative social attitudes.
At the same time, it was the law itself which helped to shape those relatively conservative attitudes. Hence a change in the law would be likely to lead to an increase in the number of abortions relating to Northern Ireland.
The number would increase to become greater than what had previously been the number of abortions relating to Northern Ireland-origin women travelling to Great Britain for abortions.
That this has happened is now proven by the figures produced by a Freedom of Information request (lodged by the TUV) where the Department of Health shows the number of abortions which happened in Northern Ireland in 2023-24.
Evidence that Northern Ireland-related abortions were at a relatively low number prior to the change in law in 2019 was provided by the Both Lives Matter (BLM) (2017) publication ‘One Hundred Thousand – a report on the number of people who are alive today because of Northern Ireland’s laws on abortion’.
(https://bothlivesmatter.org/onehundredthousand - for the estimation of how many lives were saved through Northern Ireland’s more conservative abortion law, see particularly pages 12-14.)
This research showed that during 1967-2015 if Northern Ireland had had the same abortion rate (number per thousand women aged 15-44) as Scotland then 163,760 abortions would have occurred.
During the same period a reasonable and informed estimate (based on data from the English Department of Health and the British Journal of Gynaecology) is that 61,311 Northern Ireland women travelled to Great Britain for abortions.
A reasonable inference is that during that half century period if Northern Ireland had had abortion laws similar to Great Britain alongside Great Britain social attitudes a total of 100,000 extra abortions would have occurred (i.e. 153,760 minus 61,311). That is equivalent to about 2,000 additional abortions each year.
Not everyone accepted the basis of the Both Lives Matter’s estimations and complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA).
Very significantly, when ASA conducted a review of the BLM method they concluded, given consideration by independent statisticians, that there was indeed a “reasonable probability” that the BLM figure work was an accurate reflection of what actually happened. In other words, the method used was verified by independent experts.
What this new Freedom of Information data show is that the liberalisation of Northern Ireland’s abortion law in 2019 has indeed been accompanied by a massive upsurge in the number of abortions relating to Northern Ireland.
During 2010-19 the average annual number of abortions relating to Northern Ireland women travelling to GB was 919. However, in 2023-24 2,792 legal abortions occurred in Northern Ireland – an increase of about 1,800 or nearly 2,000.
As we look back on the abortion law change in Northern Ireland which occurred in late 2019 and then came into effect in March 2020 we can see that it was a constitutional outrage which has led to a moral outrage.
During a period when the Stormont Executive was not operating (the executive did return in January 2020), backbench MPs in Great Britain, with the connivance of the UK government, imposed a fundamental law change which would not have passed through the Stormont Assembly.
Those MPs did not represent Northern Ireland constituencies and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that quite a lot of ‘virtue signalling’ was going on. Such MPs were able to indulge a passion for social radicalism at little or no political cost to themselves.
As was feared and predicted, that law change which flipped Northern Ireland from having one of Europe’s most conservative abortion regimes to one of the most liberal ones has led to an upsurge in abortion numbers.
One of the most frightening things about this new situation is how little comment this change has attracted but we must not accept what we now have as the new normal.
l Dr Esmond Birnie is an independent economist