Women who have abortions are not careless about contraception. They are not ignorant and they are not generally unable to get hold of it. The uncomfortable truth is that contraception lets women down.

Yes, sometimes we don’t use it properly – a condom is bound to fail if you don’t get it out of the packet, and you can’t expect the pill to be reliable unless you take it reliably. But that’s only part of the story.

We published new research this week that showed of more than 60,000 women who availed themselves of Bpas abortion services last year, a quarter were using some kind of hormonal contraceptive, such as the pill, which we normally think of as trustworthy (it has a success rate of more than 90 per cent). When you add in those who told us they were using barrier methods, the proportion of women using at least one form of contraception rose to a half (51.2 per cent).