ABORTIONS cannot be made free in Jersey because people may choose to use terminations rather than contraception, a leading health official has said.
Health policy director Ruth Johnson was being questioned about planned reforms to Jersey’s abortion law by the Health and Social Security Scrutiny Panel yesterday – which, if passed, would allow terminations up to just before 22 weeks and remove the requirement for patients to claim to be “distressed”.
Under the proposed law, patients would still pay £185 if they are Jersey residents or £511 if they are not residents.
Asked about the cost of abortions, Ms Johnson said making the fees statutory, rather than set by policy, would make them more transparent.
She added: “The other thing to always think about when you’re talking about the costs associated with termination is in Jersey, contraception is a paid-for service.
“If termination was to be made a free service, and contraception was a paid-for service, you run the risk of creating some kind of perverse incentives to use early-stage termination as a form of contraception.”
In other jurisdictions, she further explained, there was “a very small, but core group of women who use termination as a form of contraception, partly because of barriers to accessing contraception”.
Unlike the UK – where contraception is free at all ages – most European countries set an age limit on free contraception, generally between the ages of 21 and 30.
But, Ms Johnson added that termination rates and access to contraception are not necessarily linked, but instead “based on a whole load of other factors and drivers”. She added that making contraception more easily accessible was a “future policy decision.
Asked whether work on the accessibility of contraception was progressing, Assistant Health Minister Andy Howell apologised and said she was “ashamed to say, but that’s the only thing that I’ve fallen down on, that we haven’t finished yet, because it’s quite complex”.
The new abortion law – proposed at the end of January, after a consultation in last spring – aims to remove barriers to accessing abortion and allowing nurses and midwives to carry out some consultations. Under the proposals, only one consultation would be needed instead of two.
