How they got £163m in foreign aid
ABORTION provider Marie Stopes has received more than £163million of Britain’s foreign aid budget to expand its work in the last five years.
Officials have doubled annual aid to Marie Stopes International (MSI) allowing it to export its family planning services, such as abortions, to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malawi, Kenya and Senegal.
Aid chiefs have backed the troubled abortion provider despite concerns about its clinics in the UK. The health watchdog CQC last year suspended some of its services because of ‘serious concerns’ abortions weren’t being properly processed.
A Mail investigation yesterday revealed how its doctors are continuing to sign off abortions for thousands of women they have never met. The charity, which was founded in Britain in 1976, is one of the world’s largest family-planning bodies. It operates in 37 countries with 13,000 staff and provided 3.4million abortion services last year. The UK’s Department for International Development (Dfid) has increased its funding from £19.6million in 2012 to £44.5million in 2016.
Antonia Tully of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children last night said: ‘We completely deplore taxpayers’ money being spent on abortions in any country, but especially these very poor countries where women need many more things before they need abortion. This is not really helping women in the third world.’ MSI has been accused of milking the public purse after it emerged 21 of its employees are paid more than £100,000, with its boss banking £420,755 in 2015.
An MSI spokesman said: ‘Our work gives women the means to manage the size of their family, and reduces the chance they will risk death and disability through an unsafe abortion. Our most recent Dfidfunded project will avert more than 26,000 maternal deaths.’ The spokesman added its international programmes are completely separate from its UK clinics.
A Dfid spokesman last night said MSI was providing ‘essential female healthcare’, adding it ‘supports access to safe abortion rather than abandoning vulnerable women to run the risk of dangerous, lifethreatening backstreet abortions.’