The real abortion figures

One of my favourite themes is the power of metrics. The party who chooses the right yardsticks shapes the debate: something Labour understood early on, with their specific definition of “child poverty,” hospital waiting times and unemployment. An example jumps out at me today with the abortion debate. The Times strikingly visualises what we’re talking about, with a picture of an unborn child below a graph of how many of them are being aborted. But the graph shows the sanitised Department of Health graph of “abortion rate per 1,000 population”. This means nothing to anyone. Turn to page 33 and Tommy’s advert has it right – a vivid image with the slogan. “One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.” This jumps out as you. And so would the phrase “one in four pregnancies ends in abortion” which (as I’ve blogged before) is the actual (ONS) figure. As the abortion debate reignites, it’s a fact that deserves to be dropped in.