Can the Need for Later Abortions be Prevented? the British Experience Suggests Not Without Prohibition (Essay‪)‬

"AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE" IS A caveat that even the most ardent prochoice advocates would apply to abortion. Few people are entirely comfortable with the idea of second-trimester abortions. Most people, including abortion-providing doctors and abortion-seeking women, have a personal threshold beyond which they find abortion unacceptable. It's a subjective, often irrational and arbitrary, judgment. But it means that while early abortion is a common procedure, later abortions are relatively uncommon. In Britain, the law regarding abortion on mental health grounds, which is broadly interpreted to include unwanted pregnancy, is the same at three weeks gestation as it is at 23 weeks. Yet, of the 198,000 abortions for residents of England and Wales that took place in 2007, just over 139,000 took place between three and nine weeks gestations and just fewer than 3,000 took place between 20 and 24 weeks. (Department of Health, "Abortion Statistics 2007")