Data released from the Northern Ireland Department of Health (DOH) on January 30 shows that the number of abortions in the country has risen for the fourth year in a row.
Abortion in Northern Ireland was decriminalized in 2020, and preborn children can now legally be aborted until 24 weeks gestation — and even later under certain circumstances. According to the DOH’s latest report, 2,792 preborn children were killed in 2023/2024. This is up from the 2,168 aborted in 2022/2023 and is a 77% increase from the 1,574 committed in the first reporting year of 2020/2021. In total 8,241 abortions have been carried out since abortion was decriminalized in Northern Ireland.
The statistics also show that 72 abortions were committed on women under 18, 2,118 were committed on women aged 18 – 34 years, and 567 were committed on women aged 35 years and over. The vast majority of abortions were committed via the abortion pill; 198 surgical abortions were committed.
Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) leader Jim Allister released a statement following the report’s release, calling the abortion increase “shocking” and “deeply troubling.”
He lamented the lack of more data within the abortion reports, noting that reporting in Great Britain includes more in-depth information, including details as to the mother’s socioeconomic status and whether or not she has had any prior abortions. Such information can help lawmakers better understand why a woman seeks an abortion so that they can potentially craft legislation that would help mothers choose to parent their children instead.
TUV MLA Timothy Gaston also spoke out against the increase.
“It is clear from today’s figures that abortion is increasingly becoming just another form of birth control in Northern Ireland and that the dishonest debate around the matter in the early 2020s, framed around ‘hard cases,’ did not deal with the real issues created by the legislation imposed on Northern Ireland,” he said.
The group Precious Life warns that the rise in abortion numbers will have dire consequences on the country, as experts say the country is projected to have the largest decrease in population in the UK, and in only six years, there will be more deaths than births.
“Killing our children is first and foremost evil,” the group wrote. “But when it adds to already falling birth rates, it also has serious repercussions from an economic and social point of view. The ‘replacement level’ is the level at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next. When our birth rates fall below the replacement rate, this means we are a dying civilization.”
