Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many individuals received medicines for abortion at home via post in (1) 2023, and (2) 2024.

The Department collects information on abortions via the HSA4 abortion notification form. The HSA4 form does not capture information on whether abortion medicine was sent via the post, and so the Department does not hold this information.

The HSA4 form does capture whether the medicine was administered at the patient’s usual place of residence. This information is published in the Abortion Statistics for England and Wales for the years 2018 to 2022. However, publication of the abortion statistics for England and Wales from 2023 onwards has been delayed due to several operational issues. These include issues associated with moving to a new data processing system and an increase in the number of paper abortion notification forms to process. We will announce the dates of the publication of the data for 2023, and later 2024, in due course.