Britain nearing U.S. in abortion numbers

A dramatic rise in the number of abortions in Britain has the country poised to overtake the United States as the worldwide procedure leader, an official says.

Member of Parliament Nadine Dorries, an abortion opponent, said with more than 205,000 women undergoing abortion procedures in 2007 in England and Wales, Britain has already earned Western Europe's highest termination rate, The Daily Mail said Friday.

Such an increase could lead to Britain surpassing the United States in terms of the greatest proportion of abortions performed, though not in actual numbers. An estimated 1.3 million abortions are performed in the United States each year.

Dorries said the steady increase in abortions in Britain since the medical practice was legalized in 1967 is likely due to a prevailing attitude that it is simply another form of contraception.

"Abortion is wrongly seen as an easy and trouble-free way of ending a pregnancy," she said. "It has moved from a resource that women turn to in an emergency and a point of crisis to becoming a form of contraception."

"This has been brought about as a result of an ill-conceived notion that it is just a minor procedure with no side or lasting effects, but this is not the case," she said.

The Mail said there is concern that 2008 abortion numbers in Britain will exceed the 205,600 abortions recorded by the Office for National Statistics last year.