A 23-year-old London woman has opened up to the BBC about the four abortions she had between the ages of 18 and 22, in the hopes that she will convince other young women to think twice before having their own abortions.
"Lisa," a pseudonym given by the BBC, had her first abortion at 18, her second at 21, and two more abortions at 22. At 20, she became pregnant but decided to keep the baby, and is now raising her one surviving daughter.
Lisa told the BBC she believes abortion is morally wrong, but had the abortions anyway because she couldn't bear the thought of having four children, each with a different father.
"I was really careless. I can't blame anyone else," Lisa told the BBC. "I should have been more responsible, because I've killed a life now. And it wasn't that baby's fault."
Lisa said that she was terrified the first time she went to have an abortionist end her baby's life, but that time and repetition changed her and made her more callous.
"It does get easier with the more you have," she told the BBC. "I know that sounds really bad, but that is just how it is."
She said that by sharing her own experience of being changed by abortion, she hoped to convince other women to make better choices.
"I thought that if I could tell my story, maybe young women would think twice about having sex without contraception, or sleeping with guys they don't really know," Lisa said. "I want to tell other women that abortions aren't just something you should do. It could change your life."
Even though Lisa echoes the abortion industry line about contraceptives preventing abortion, she admits she was using contraception during each and every one of her conceptions – everything from the pill to semi-permanent solutions like the IUD.
"I've tried the pill, the patch, the injection, the coil and the implant. And they didn't work," Lisa said. "I bled continuously while I was on them. And the coil gave me pains, so I had to take that out after a month."
She added, "No one wants to keep on having terminations - so I have tried different methods of contraception but they don't seem to work for me."
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Lisa is far from alone. A telephone study of former clients by the Marie Stopes UK abortionist group found that 57 percent of those who sought repeat abortions were active users of contraception who nonetheless became pregnant anyway.
"Our research shows all sorts of women of all ages can experience repeat unwanted pregnancy," Genevieve Edwards, Marie Stopes UK's director of policy, told the BBC. "In the past we've failed to tackle this, because we didn't want to stigmatize women."
Edwards admits that contraceptives, particularly the short-term kind, are not as effective as many people think, and when they fail, many women look to abortion as a backup plan.
"One-in-three women will have an abortion, and one-in-four of them will go on to have another," she said in announcing the results of the survey, which focused on girls and young women between age 16 and 24. "Our research shows there is no particular demographic group who are more likely to have abortions – it can happen to any of us. But for the majority of women, it was more often the short-term methods that failed them."
Edwards said she would like to see the morning-after-pill – which, taken after sex, either prevents ovulation or causes the uterus to become hostile to a fertilized egg, inducing a very early abortion – become more popular in the UK as a way of heading off later abortions.
"We are particularly concerned about low awareness of emergency contraception," said Edwards. "Family planning doesn't start and stop with condoms or the pill and much more needs to be done to support women on choosing and using the contraception that suits their lifestyle and stage of life."
But Paul Tully of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) told the BBC more contraception isn't the answer; fixing society is.
"Increasing the provision of contraception isn't going to reduce the abortion rate," Tully said. "Contraception doesn't address the social, financial and relationship reasons which are usually the drivers for women to seek abortions. We need to answer those problems, and then we'll see the abortion rate coming down."
BY KIRSTEN ANDERSEN, LifeSiteNews.com
