"Women will die without abortion" is a lie to alarm and convert the masses, diverting attention from the real reasons women succumb to the pressures of termination as a solution to the social injustices they face.

In my research I've described the use of statements that women's live are at risk and that women will surely die without abortion as alarmist disinformation. Such statements are deliberately misleading as they do not represent the reality of abortion which is mostly undertaken as a means to address social, economic or relational issues. We don't keep great stats here in Australia, however the UK does, and we have no reason to believe that Australian women are more likely to need abortion as a life saving measure than British women.

The UK has specific grounds for abortion. In 2018, of more than 205,000 abortions, 99.9% were undertaken under ground C. Ground C represents 'mental health, which translates to psychosocial. It is this category that encompasses the economic, social and relational issues.

The UK also have a ground F and G. There were 7 abortions in total carried out under these grounds: ; F being ‘to save the life of the pregnant woman’ and G, ‘to prevent grave and permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman’.

7 out of more than 205,000.

Of interest also are the number of 'foetal reductions', usually as a result of Artificial Reproductive Technologies producing pregnancies with more than one foetus.

In 2018, there were 74 terminations to reduce a twin pregnancy to a singleton, 30 to reduce triplets to twins, and 6 to reduce triplets to a singleton.  Remember the women involved in these terminations have often undergone invasive, expensive and time-consuming treatment to get pregnant at all.  This seems the epitome of dissonance that we can work so hard to create children for women and think little then of 'reducing' them when too many exist.

Further information on these statistics is available in the original report here.

The fact is that abortion does not need to be more accessible, or decriminalised in order to save women's lives.  In fact, one could argue that while abortion continues to be so readily available as a 'solution' to women's social problems, there is little motivation to address such issues in any other way.