Abortion - Whose Choice?

A recent MORI poll shows that one in three people (34%) believe that the law should be changed to give pregnant women the right to an abortion in any circumstances. However, just over half (51%) disagree that the law should be so changed.

Forty three per cent think that the law should be changed to allow women who have been pregnant for 12 weeks or less to have an automatic right to an abortion, 45% disagree.

When asked whether women who were pregnant as the result of rape or incest should have an automatic right to an abortion 86% said that they should and only 7% said they should not.

Opinions differ on the proportion of women in Great Britain who are likely to have an abortion at some point in their lives. The range of responses to this question are as follows:

0-5	8%
6-10	9%
11-15	5%
16-20	10%
21-25	6%
26-30	9%
31-35	3%
36-40	5%
41-45	1%
46-50	9%
More than 50	10%
Don't know	22%
Refused	2%

Fifty three per cent answered correctly that most abortions occur between 6-12 weeks during the pregnancy.

Only 11% correctly identified that the time it took to perform an abortion up to and including the twelfth week of pregnancy was ten minutes or less. A further 30% thought an abortion took longer than this but within half-an-hour, 15% said that it took between half-an-hour and an hour and 8% said more than an hour. A third said that they did not know.

Technical details: MORI interviewed a representative quota sample of 2,004 adults aged 15+ from 10-13 October 1997 at 171 sampling points in Great Britain. The survey was carried out for Whose Choice, a Channel 4 programme commissioned as part of a series of programmes on abortion. The interviews were conducted face-to-face, in-home. Data has been weighted to the GB population profile.