Thursday, June 20, 2013

Abortion statistics by age and ethnicity

Thought I'd keep up my graph-making skills (very rudimentary) with the abortion statistics released yesterday. The overall rate continues to drop which is good news in anybody's book.  The first graph shows the number of abortions by ethnicity, where the steepest decline (but coming from the highest number) is amongst Europeans:
The next shows the number of abortions by age. There's a stand-out here. The very steep decline is amongst 15-19 year-olds. As I've mentioned before, the teenage birthrate has also been falling over exactly the same period. Taken alongside this information, we know that there are fewer pregnancies occurring (unless there were increased numbers of miscarriages which is doubtful.)

So less (heterosexual) sex, more use of contraception, more effective contraception? I don't know. But it's fantastic to see these trends.

(I didn't include the older age groups as the numbers are very small and wouldn't read on this scale. But the only age group to show a  slight increase is 45+ with 49 abortions in 2002 rising to 61 in 2012).

2 comments:

Bob McCoskrie said...

Can you do number of abortions by ethnicity - per 1,000 of that ethnicity? That will show significant figures

Anonymous said...

The overall rate continues to drop which is good news in anybody's book.

not in mine. The benefit, state school, and state healthcare statistics demonstrate conclusively that there are far too many kids in NZ born to parent(s) who cannot afford their upbringing.

A responsible welfare policy would ensure the abortion rate continued to rise until no children were born into dependency - dbp, welfare, state schools, state hospitals, dole or civil service or govt jobs, superannuation.