The two-child limit did not drive the rise in abortions in England and Wales

This blog is based on an article published in the Journal of Social Policy by Christopher Grollman, Sophie Wickham, Kate Mason, Andy Pennington and Rebecca Geary.

From April 2017 the government removed social security support for new third children in families receiving Universal Credit or Tax Credits. Larger families (those with three or more children in the household) were already at a higher risk of poverty than smaller families, and the “two-child limit” raised the prospect of increasing poverty further among larger families in future. Over time an ever-greater proportion of larger families would be subject to the policy, as more third or higher children would have been born after the limit came in.

The two-child limit and its policy rationale

The two-child limit was just one of several cuts to social security payments made by the Conservative government in its 2015 Summer budget. Most notably, the two-child limit and the benefit cap hold down Universal Credit payments available to larger families, most of which include adults in work. Since the 2024 election, the limit remains in place, which has been a source of tension for the new government.

The government said the aim of the policy was to make people claiming social security support “face the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely through work”. Since only 55% of pregnancies in the UK are planned, one way in which the policy would succeed would have been by making women on low incomes more likely to terminate unintended pregnancies. In the years after the policy came into force, the number of abortions in England and Wales increased substantially, after having been broadly stable for several years. In 2020, pregnancy advice services reported that some people seeking abortions had done so due to the two-child limit.

Individual decisions to terminate pregnancies often involve many considerations, and at the level of whole populations the relationship between social security payments and people’s decisions to have children is also complex. Evidence from Germany suggests that changes in targeted social security payments (those aimed at people on low incomes) have less impact on fertility than universal child-support payments. There is evidence that universal child benefits increase fertility, including (in Spain) through decreasing abortions. It was already known that the two-child limit had a negligible effect on overall fertility, as well as not increasing employment earnings for parents.

How we examined the impact of the two-child limit

Our study aimed to find out whether the two-child limit was related to the increase in the number of abortions in the years after its introduction, looking at both the number of previous births a person had and the level of deprivation in their local area. We used anonymised data on individual abortions (“microdata”) from the Department for Health and Social Care, which included both factors.

We looked at whether the increase in abortions from 2017 onwards was concentrated among people likely to be affected by the two-child limit. Put simply, this would have meant higher numbers of abortions in more deprived areas (where more people are likely to be affected by the limit) and among people with two or more children already (since the limit applies from the third child onwards).

What the data show: broad increases, not policy effects

We found that there were increases in numbers of abortions each year across almost all social groups. The numbers are highest among people living in the most deprived areas, but the pattern of numbers before and after 2017 was the same from the most deprived areas through to the least deprived areas: all areas were pretty flat until 2016 and increased each year from 2017.

There are more abortions among women with no previous births than among women with any other number. Before 2017 numbers of abortions were already increasing among women with two or more previous births, and carried on increasing from 2017 onwards. By contrast, before 2017 numbers were falling for women with fewer than two previous births, but from 2017 onwards started rising. This was the opposite of what we would expect if the increase from 2017 were driven by concerns about the two-child limit. Publicly available data from Scotland, and data from England for 2022, show a similar picture.

What explains the rise if not the two-child limit?

Qualitative evidence clearly shows that some women’s decision to terminate was influenced by the limit, and financial considerations more broadly are often key in that decision. However, this does not explain the increase seen across society after 2016, which occurred across all levels of deprivation, and particularly among women in their early 20s and with no previous births. Other factors beyond financial circumstances that are important in people’s childbearing decisions include social instability and uncertainty about the future. Such uncertainty was certainly associated with the Brexit referendum in 2016 and may have been particularly strongly felt among younger people. Since then, continued austerity and the Covid pandemic have done nothing to lessen uncertainty among younger people in the UK, while costs of necessities, particularly housing, have continued to rise.

The two-child limit policy supposedly aimed to make people claiming social security support “face the same financial choices” about having children as those not claiming. We discuss in the recent paper how this aim is inconsistent with other policies introduced at the same time, such as support for an increased minimum wage. But whatever the reason for the increase in abortions, we can conclude from all the available studies that the two-child limit policy did not “succeed” in reducing births or increasing employment among people on low incomes. What remains is a growing generation of children living in poverty, alongside the moral and financial costs this creates for society as a whole.

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Reference

Grollman, Christopher et al. 2025. “The Two-Child Policy Was Not Associated with an Increase in Abortions among Its Target Population.” Journal of Social Policy: 1–19. doi: 10.1017/S004727942500011X.

About the authors

Christopher Grollman is Research Fellow in Public Health, Policy & Systems at the University of Liverpool, U.K.

Sophie Wickham is Tenure Track Research Fellow in Public Health, Policy & Systems at the University of Liverpool, U.K.

Kate Mason is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Health Policy at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

Andy Pennington is Research Fellow in Public Health, Policy & Systems at the University of Liverpool, U.K.

Rebecca Geary is Senior Lecturer in Public Health, Policy & Systems at the University of Liverpool, U.K.