Liberalised abortion laws have left women with more responsibility, more trauma, and more poverty, and it doesn’t reduce deaths from unsafe abortions, according to Dr. Calum Miller, a medical doctor, philosopher, and abortion researcher.
Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, Dr. Miller also argued the vast majority of abortion is unethical as the practice is an active choice to end a human life.
According to Dr. Miller, rather than liberating women from the consequences of sex, abortion has “liberated men completely” and left women alone to either go through a traumatic abortion or to have the baby and raise the child.
“So the woman says, parenthood is optional for me. But the man says, well, in that case, parenthood is optional for me, and I’m having nothing to do with it. It’s you that has to deal with this, and so this is seen in the empirical evidence,” he said.
“We’ve seen that single motherhood has massively increased since abortion rather than decreasing. And that has caused huge poverty rates among women, among children, in particular.”
Women have “become more dependent, they’ve had more financial problems, because they have been left to pick up the pieces of pregnancy,” he said.
And that has a domino effect throughout society, according to Dr. Miller.
“We also know that the family breakdown caused by this causes increased mental health problems for the mother and the father and for the child. The father and the child are both more likely to be involved in crime and particularly violent crime going forward.
“And all of us who have read any of the evidence on this know just how many problems family breakdown causes throughout society. And so the legalisation of abortion has been a really key factor in that and has really been the driving force behind that,” he said.
Asked about the argument that legal abortion would save women from getting unsafe backstreet abortions, Dr. Miller said his research has led to the conclusion that “there’s not really any good evidence that legalising abortion makes that problem better.”
A country that has good health care and doesn’t allow abortion tends to have much better outcomes than a country with bad health care and legalised abortion, he said.
“In Malta, they haven’t had a maternal death in ten years. In Poland, they have the lowest maternal mortality ratio in the whole world. Both of these countries do not allow 98 percent of abortions, Malta doesn’t allow any except if the woman’s life is at risk. And these two countries have the best maternal mortality in the world. They don’t have any women dying from backstreet or unsafe abortions,” he said.
“If you go to India, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa, et cetera, tonnes of countries all over the world with legal, supposedly safe abortion, they still have many deaths from women getting unsafe abortions. In fact, in some cases, it makes the problem worse,” he said.
“Now, that might seem unintuitive, but it is the empirical reality.”
Most Abortions Done on Mental Health Ground
Abortion is affecting hundreds of thousands of babies and women, Dr. Miller said.“We have 200,000 abortions a year in this country, a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion, and one in three women in their lifetime in the UK will have an abortion. So it’s a huge problem,” he said.
As for the reasons of the abortions, “In the UK, 98 percent of abortions are done for so-called mental health reasons ... mental health is important to take care of, but the reality is that abortion doesn’t actually solve any mental health problems and that the law is exploited.
“So in this country, if you go to the doctor, and you say, I want a baby boy, having a baby girl would affect my mental health, you can have an abortion for mental health reasons, because it would count as mental health because you don’t want a girl. So it’s very liberally interpreted,” he said.
The majority of the pregnancies and abortions are in England and Wales. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2021, more than a quarter (26.5 percent) of the 824,983 pregnancies ended in abortion.
The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities said 98 percent of abortion during the year was performed under ground C, meaning they were performed within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy over the risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman. Of those performed underground C, 99.9 percent were reported as being performed because of a risk to the woman’s mental health.
‘What About My Body My Choice?’
Dr. Miller argues that if we’re to treat all lives as equals, abortion would only be allowed when a woman’s life is at risk as killing is allowed in self-defence.“We can’t kill a five-year-old child or an adult, because they’re causing someone distress, they were conceived in the wrong circumstances, et cetera.”
“And what he says is, what about my body? You can see my body, I’m missing my feet, I’m missing my hands, my body is completely different and I had no choice about it. So what about my body, my choice? Because this is the reality of abortion.
“Fundamentally, this is not just one body, this is two bodies. And therefore, we have to take both of those into account when we talk about my body, my choice,” he said.
It’s “pretty clear when it comes to the science that a life begins at fertilisation,” he said, “The question is just when does that life begin to matter, when do we give it rights.”
