Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what recent estimate she had made of the amount of funding her Department has allocated to financing abortions; and if she will make a statement.

By helping the world’s poorest women access modern contraception, we will prevent an estimated 6 million unintended pregnancies and 3 million abortions on average each year.

Family planning reduces, but on its own does not eliminate, the backstreet abortions that kill women. So, where this is not against local law, the UK will consider supporting access to safe abortion in the world’s poorest countries. UK aid cannot be used to fund illegal services.

DFID supports a wide range of reproductive health services designed around women’s needs, promotion of reproductive health services to prevention and management of consequences of abortion. DFID includes this entire range of services under “reproductive health care spend” in accordance with the OECD-DAC purpose codes for tracking ODA spend. For this reason, costs and numbers of particular individual procedures are not available.