The latest stats reveal that women, having agency to make informed decisions, take the prospect of motherhood very seriously
Whenever I’m in a semi-public bathroom – a Costa in Camden, a Starbucks near the river – I always think about the pregnancy tests that have been performed in its cubicles. The hurried march from Boots next door, or Poundland at a push, an urgent, staccato piss on a stick. They say you need to wait three minutes, but often you get the result more quickly than that – the little window darkens as the liquid soaks through, and there’s the blue test line, which you have to remind yourself not to feel anything about, and then (and now you’re calling out to the woman hovering busily outside, she’s accidentally activating the hand-dryer with her shoulder, just one minute! sorry!) you’re holding your breath, and then you leave the bathroom and then… Then everything else.
Last week it was reported that in 2022 the number of abortions in England and Wales reached a record high. Almost a third of conceptions ended in legal abortions, up from about two in 10 a decade earlier. The rightwing press was outraged. Katherine O’Brien from the British Pregnancy Advisory Services (Bpas) said the two reasons for the rise in the number of people having abortions are, first, barriers to accessing contraception, with lots of women unable to get appointments with their GPs to renew prescriptions – and on top of that, confusion around emergency contraception. Second, the “cost-of-living crisis”, which is forcing couples to make “sometimes tough decisions around continuing or ending a pregnancy”. The third reason is: they can.
As people increasingly decide to have smaller families, and to start having children later in life, it’s inevitable that there will be unwanted pregnancies. But instead of having children they’re unprepared to care for, these people are making a sensible choice that avoids derailing the life, career, family they’ve been so diligently building. The new abortion stats reveal more women with the ability to make informed decisions about the shape they want their lives to take. To concentrate on building a career, saving for a home, to have one child, to avoid being tethered to a partner, to remain child-free. Instead of compromising their ambitions, their comfort, desires, relationships, creative life, abortion is a straightforward decision, and one that is hopefully shedding its taboos. Rather than treating the prospect of motherhood casually, the fact that more people are choosing to have an abortion is a sign, to me, that these women are taking it very seriously.
As people decide to have smaller families, and to have children later in life, it’s inevitable that there will be unwanted pregnancies
Because every unwanted pregnancy creates its own world. Each one contains its own excruciating story of dread and suffering, one that, if followed through – an unwanted baby born to a mother unequipped to care for them – can stretch out down generations, a bitter little bruise that never quite disappears. But then there’s the other side of that. Which is the story contained in each one of these numbers from the Office for National Statistics, every one a person. If that woman, upon leaning against a bathroom stall and seeing the pregnancy test, knows she’s able to get an abortion, able to access this crucial piece of healthcare, then another new little world is formed, where she is granted autonomy, and a profound sense of freedom.
The first pregnancy test I did was in the toilets of an Oxford Street Pret a Manger that no longer exists. I was a teenager. I had travelled into town from my art foundation course in Chelsea, having seen signs pasted up the escalators at Oxford Circus that offered free pregnancy tests and impartial advice. So my boyfriend and I made the silent journey to an office in a funny street near Leicester Square, except: our train had been delayed, and by the time we arrived, the office had just closed. Which led to Boots, and Pret a Manger, and so on, and the rest of my life.
It was only many years later that I learned the office we’d rushed to was a “crisis pregnancy centre”. These are unregulated clinics that promote themselves as confidential advisory services, but are funded by pro-life groups in order to dissuade women from having abortions. There are still plenty around, providing misinformation to vulnerable people every day. Amnesty International recently mapped the finances of 65 anti-rights groups operating across the UK, including anti-abortion organisations, and found they spent £106m between 2019 and 2023, an increase of more than 33%. It was horribly lucky that my train was delayed – I was able to make a choice.
Years later, when I got pregnant and had a baby in my early 30s, I became even more militant about abortion rights. The idea of forcing anybody to give birth, whether through removing access to abortion or by attaching shame to the concept, the idea that a person must carry that uncomfortable love for an unwanted baby alongside their debt, or compromises, or ambition, became mad to me, unfathomable. Having experienced this new pain – the pain of loving a child – the straightforwardness of abortion revealed itself to me as not just necessary but suddenly… wonderful. While some may be wringing their hands about the rise in abortion rates (one news piece concentrated on how the “revelations were met with sadness”, another said the data was “staggering and heart wrenching”), there’s a deeper truth in the numbers. They are a reflection of a welcome shift in power.
And another thing: nights in silk, words on screen, women on canvas
Chic dreams My fantasy summer wardrobe consists of a handful of vests that are so white they’re blue, and infinite pairs of glorious pyjamas. Olivia von Halle has just launched two new luxurious silks: linen-silk and semi-sheer silk chiffon (even saying the words out loud sounds expensive) and a selection of decadent pyjama sets that are far too nice to save for bedtime.
No words When I read that the Pocket app was closing I gasped out loud on the train. Pocket is a ‘read-it-later’ service – it’s where I’ve saved hundreds of tabs worth of longform journalism to read on my commute, or when I can’t sleep. The reasoning for its closure is: the way we use the internet has changed, which, again, shocked me in an unexpected way. I’m already mourning an internet that wanted to be read, rather than watched. And I’ve downloaded Instapaper.
In the frame Caroline Walker paints the everyday lives of women – shop workers, her mother, nurses in a maternity unit at UCH, her daughter – glimpsed through a window (left: Daphne, 2021). A new exhibition of her dazzling cinematic canvases has opened at the Hepworth, Wakefield (and in November moves to Chichester’s Pallant House Gallery) – it’s called Mothering.
Photograph by Getty Images
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