Earlier this month, singer Lily Allen caused a minor furore when she laughed and joked about her multiple abortions, saying she used to “get pregnant all the time” and she couldn’t remember “exactly how many” abortions she had undergone.
Even though abortion numbers continue to soar in Britain, there was something about the sheer callousness on display, and the crass disregard for the preborn lives that had been ended, that led to some public disquiet and media commentary.
The Irish media, of course, studiously avoided the story, as it always does when covering said story might disrupt their narrative that abortion can only be a good and empowering thing, even to the point where it is the basis of an asinine, unfunny comedy sketch and a good old snigger on national TV.
So we should not be surprised then, that almost all of the establishment media outlets in Ireland completely ignored the annual report released by the Department of Health last Friday evening which recorded that a new, grim record had been set as 10,852 abortions were carried out in 2024 – the highest number on record since the law changed in 2019.
It should be noted that, according to its website, Department issued no press release on this new record. No comment from the Minister on their ability to keep ratcheting up the umber of life-ending procedures despite being seemingly unable to tackle waiting lists, or the number of people on trollies, or the abysmal failure to provide care for children with autism or scoliosis, or end the general chaos in the health system, or finish the Children’s Hospital, etc, etc, etc.
Never mind all that, the Department of Health has a new metric: they are, it seems, able to provide for any number of abortions, though sneaking out a report on a Friday evening without a press release might indicate that even the abortion cheerleaders in this government might have reservations about drawing attention to this particular new record.
This morning, the Independent broke the media silence, which was so complete as to suggest a kind of contrivance, reporting that “Abortions in Ireland rise to a record 10,852 – highest number since law changed” – although the piece only contacted an abortion provider for comment, because it must be in breach of an unwritten code to ask a pro-life advocate if perhaps there might be some thought given to reducing the death toll in the way that is done with road deaths or any other metric which captures the loss of human life.
The numbers are actually staggering. Just 2,879 women travelled for an abortion from Ireland in 2018 – a number that had steadily been decreasing – while the then Minister for Health suggested that another 1,000 may have taken abortion pills. That jumped to 6,666 abortions in 2019, and has kept increasing dramatically so that now 1 in 6 pregnancies are being deliberately aborted.
There were 54,062 births in Ireland in 2024 compared to 61,022 in 2018 – a fall of almost 7,000 or 11% in the annual total in that period. There were 10,852 abortions in 2024, almost three times the number recorded and estimated in 2018, an almost unbelievable increase. The HSE does not record the number of miscarriages. The maths is pretty straightforward, and the trend is obvious.
The number of abortions are soaring and we’re seeing a pronounced decrease in the number of births. That means that the individual human tragedy that is every abortion is also having an collective impact: its adding to the country’s fertility collapse. We are literally aborting our future, but the government is only interested in talking about how to increase abortion access.
What new record, one wonders, might need to be set to prompt any kind of acknowledgment that the appallingly liberal abortion law introduced to so much fanfare has almost immediately led to the worst possible scenario instead of abortion being ‘rare’ ? The government refuses to even acknowledge there is a problem, and that blind, wilful denial is effective as long as RTÉ, the Irish Times, Newstalk, Today FM et al continue to run cover for the horrifying abortion rate.
(Indeed, almost the only offering from RTÉ since the referendum was won – not by the official Yes campaign, but by the decades-long, full-throated media drive for Repeal – has been a dishonest and manipulative documentary pushing for further liberalisation and resolutely ignoring the grimly skyrocketing numbers, or the abortion of a baby after a misdiagnosis, or the woman who almost died after taking abortion pills when an ectopic pregnancy was missed, and much more.)
55,000 ABORTIONS THUS FAR
What the public doesn’t know won’t bother them seems to be the tacit agreement. But 50,000 abortions had taken place to the end of December 2024. If trends in 2025 continued, and there has certainly been no effort from the authorities to reduce the number, that total has now likely reached some 55,000 unborn babies killed.
Because can we stop the pussyfooting and the nonsense and the denial of reality? We’re not living in the Dark Ages. Everyone knows its a baby, but unborn babies are tiny and vulnerable and voiceless as well as being human and living and growing and unique. Its just that in this shiny, new, progressive Ireland being vulnerable and voiceless means you can be stripped of all protection in the name of compassion.
And that brings me back to Lily Allen and the attempts to create a new reality, where abortion is something we can not only embrace but enjoy a good laugh about. But at least in the UK, the issue of repeat abortions is acknowledged.
In 2022, the last full year for which figures are available for England and Wales, 251,377 abortions took place – just as in Ireland, the highest number on record. In Scotland in the same year, a further 16,584 abortions were reported, also a grim new record and a leap of 19% on the previous year.
Driving up some of those horrendous total has been the rising number of repeat abortions. In fact, in England and Wales in 2022, 41% or 102,689 of the total were repeat abortions, meaning the women had undergone one or more previous abortions. Abortion campaigners have defended this rising trend by saying that women “need” abortion (as if there were no other options) at different stages in their lives, and that “no-one makes this decision lightly”, and that none should dare question why women might have multiple abortions.
Maybe that’s because that discussion could reveal, not a litany of desperate cases, but the sort of chilling exchange that was hosted by BBC when Lily Allen and her podcast co-host, Miquita Oliver, had a right old skit about the ten babies they had aborted between them.
For Allen, it may have been five abortions, as she chortled that she couldn’t really remember, as if she was talking about a change of hair colour. “I think I’m on my third, maybe fourth, and I just remember before that it was a complete disaster area. Yeah, I’d get pregnant all the time all the time.”
She then sang to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s My Way: ‘Abortions I’ve had a few… but then again… I can’t remember exactly how many’. She added, ‘I can’t remember. I think maybe like, I want to say four or five.’
Her co-host chimed in: “I’ve had about five too!” as if it was some hideous twinning exercise. “Lily, I’m so happy I can say that and you can say it and no one came to shoot us down, no judgment. We’ve had about the same amount of abortions.”
They then discussed whether it was “romantic” for a man to pay for an abortion, before Allen admitted it was “getting rid of the problem”.
“I think it IS romantic … am I an idiot?” Oliver asked. Yes, that’s an idiotic response, to be honest, just as it is idiotic for women to be blind to the obvious: that abortion is a gift to sleazy, careless, feckless men everywhere who mostly have zero respect for you, your body, or the responsibilities. Those men, of course, can get away with being sleazy, careless and feckless by donning a tshirt saying ‘This is what a feminist looks like’, though women mostly won’t even need them to do that anymore.
Allen also said: “It actually irritates me, and I’ve said it before on the record. I’ve seen memes going around sometimes, on Instagram from pro-abortion accounts or whatever, whenever this conversation comes up, and suddenly you start seeing people posting things about extraordinary reasons for having an abortion. Like: ‘My aunt had a kid that had this disability,’ or whatever, ‘if she went full term it was going to kill her, so we have to.’ It’s like, shut up! Just: ‘I don’t want a f***ing baby right now.’ Literally, ‘Don’t want a baby’ is enough reason.”
In some morally bankrupt universe, perhaps this unedifying spectacle, the screeching with laughter about abortion, sounded empowered and assertive, but the crassness and heartlessness on show was pretty disgusting.
REPEAT ABORTIONS IN IRELAND?
In January of this year, Allen said that her mental health was “spiralling” and took time off from the BBC podcast as she was reportedly splitting from her husband, She said she was “really not in a good place”, and “finding it hard to be interested in anything”, suffering panic attacks in public and finding life “really hard”.
It’s impossible to comment on an individual case, but abortion access, and the sexual revolution that is driving up the rates of same, doesn’t seem to have made women any happier. Anxiety rates continue to climb, as do rates of depression. But there is very little appetite from the establishment for questioning the role of abortion or the isolation and disconnect caused by the kind of lifestyle that leads to multiple abortions.
In Ireland, we don’t know how many abortions are repeat abortions, or why women are having abortions in such alarmingly increasing numbers. That was a deliberate policy choice made by Simon Harris when he was Minister for Health and he made sure the annual abortion report only contained the bare minimum, with no information as to age, race, number of previous abortions, or any other data which might allow an informed analysis and review of the disturbing trend.
Is abortion being used as birth control in Ireland? Why did the much-trumpeted free contraceptive scheme not bring down the abortion rate? Are women being made to feel they have no other choice? Has immigration impacted the abortion rate? How many women are having repeat abortions? Why would any responsible government not want to have this information given the soaring numbers?
Is Lily Allen becoming the norm in Ireland too? A whole generation of women who can’t even remember the number of repeat abortions they had – but who then acknowledge that they did end their babies’ lives? That’s a norm that can only lead to some very abnormal and distressing outcomes. Our government should no longer be allowed to deliberately stick their head in the sand as our abortion rate goes through the roof, and they continue to implement a policy that is literally aborting our future.