As an organisation committed to reproductive choice, we advocate for policies and practices that enable women to make their own decisions around preventing, ending, conceiving, or continuing a pregnancy. We understand that there are often a number of factors which influence women’s family planning decisions. While for some women the decision to end a pregnancy is rooted in the desire to not have a child at that point in time, or indeed at all, other women will end a wanted pregnancy which they would have continued had their life circumstances been different.
The government’s two-child limit policy, which was first introduced in April 2017, severely restrict the amount of financial support for families with three or more children. After the first two children, universal credit and child tax credits can only be claimed in respect of a third or subsequent child born after April 2017 if one of the exceptions applies – if a pregnancy results in a multiple birth and prior to that pregnancy there were fewer than two children in that household, where the pregnancy was the result of non-consensual sex and the claimant can prove that she is not living at the same address as her attacker, or where the child in question was adopted or is being cared for in a non-parental relationship by the claimant.1 This additional support is worth nearly £2,900 per child per year.