Nearly a quarter of all abortions in Britain are carried out on girls under the age of 20, a major report EU has revealed.
The Daily Mail reporting on the data states: The shocking figures, compiled by the EU, show British teenagers are far more likely than the average European youngster to have a termination.
Those who compiled the report called for greater access to contraception, ‘youth-friendly’ sexual health services and better sex education in schools.
But others said that such lessons, given to children as young as five, are clearly not working . They blamed the disproportionate number of teen abortions in the UK on a lack of independent counselling.
The data, compiled by the REPROSTAT group, the EU’s community health monitoring programme, details abortion figures across the region.
Most of the figures are for 2008, but the data is slightly older for several countries.
The report shows some 1.2million terminations are carried out a year – the equivalent of the populations of member countries Malta and Cyprus combined. Breaking the figures down by age reveals that 22.1 per cent of all abortions carried out in the UK in 2008 were on girls aged under 20 – only in Belgium was it higher.
The abortion rate among British girls under 20 was 23.8 per 1,000. Only Estonia and Sweden had higher rates, at 24.1 and 24.4 respectively.
The French figure stood at 15.6 per 1,000 girls under 20 and the German at 6.2 per 1,000.