The Government has announced plans to financially incentivise abortion clinics to provide ‘lunch-hour’ or ‘same-day’ abortions.
The changes were announced last week as part of the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England.
Under the current NHS Payment Scheme, abortion clinics are typically paid separately for each part of the abortion pathway – the consultation, scan, and procedure. This encourages abortion providers not to rush the process in one day, and also gives women more time to consider their decision before the actual abortion procedure happens.
Under the Government’s new approach (page 28), abortion clinics will now be paid a bundled payment for providing all stages of the process – and the Government has made it clear they are doing this to financially incentivise clinics to provide abortion “consultations, scans and procedures on the same day”.
This will financially incentivise the UK’s largest private abortion providers, BPAS, MSI Reproductive Choices, and NUPAS, which are paid to provide most of the abortions provided through the NHS, to rush women into abortions with ‘same day’ or ‘lunch-hour’ abortions.
Abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choice (formerly Marie Stopes International) has in the past marketed ‘lunch-hour’ abortion services – walk-in abortion services aimed to fit into a woman’s lunch hour.
The planned changes will likely see women being rushed through the abortion process, being given little time to process and contemplate whether to go ahead with what, for many, is a life-changing decision to have an abortion.
Already, women have complained of feeling they are on a conveyor belt towards abortion, and this has been corroborated by a doctor who used to work for one of the largest abortion providers in the country.
There is also already evidence of a high-pressure environment in abortion clinics where women can be rushed into abortion decisions, with, for example, the Care Quality Commission finding MSI Reproductive Choices were paying staff bonuses for encouraging women to undergo abortions.
At all 70 Marie Stopes clinics, inspectors found evidence of a policy that saw staff utilise a high-pressure sales tactic, calling women who had decided against having an abortion to offer them another appointment.
In what was described as a “cattle market culture”, staff felt “encouraged” to ensure women went through with abortions. Staff described this as a “very target-driven culture”.
