Professor Eva Pajkrt:

The report distinguishes between first and second trimester. I do not know why. It distinguishes the gestational age at which there can be termination and when there is foetal viability, which is 24 weeks. Abortion clinics, however, will terminate up to 22 weeks. That stems from the days when we did not have any very accurate dating. We now have far more accurate dating scans, they are scanned with the variation, but if they went beyond 22 weeks they might be terminating a foetus that was further progressed. In the Netherlands the majority of the terminations are performed in abortion clinics, but at 23 weeks they are performed in hospitals. There were only 127 cases last year and we assume they were because of foetal anomalies.