Victoria Gillick

UNDER age sex campaigner and anti-abortionist Victoria Gillick has been “dismayed” to discover that more than 4,000 babies have been aborted at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kings Lynn since the Millennium.

“That is enough to fill 20 primary or three secondary schools,” said Mrs Gillick after she obtained the abortion figures from the hospital in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Mrs Gillick - who won a 1980s court ruling that girls under 16 should not be given contraception without parental consent, only to have it reversed a year later - believes abortion figures have risen because more women from Eastern European countries have undergone operations.

Mrs Gillick, secretary of the Fenland Life Supporter Group, said: “I feel the big increase is not from local women but women from former Soviet countries, where abortion is seen as common place.”

Figures show there were 287 abortions at the hospital in 2000. That figure rose to 459 in 2011, with a total of 4,320 abortions in those 12 years.

Another Freedom of Information request made by Mrs Gillick revealed that 20 per cent of children in Wisbech schools come from Eastern Europe.

“There is a higher birth rate and I guess the high number of abortions is also accounted for by Eastern Europeans,” she said. “My feelings are, that it doesn’t matter whose babies they are, it is a tragedy for all of them.”

Mrs Gillick is planning to send the figures to North West Norfolk MP Henry Bellingham and North East Cambridgeshire MP Steve Barclay.

“I want to alert them to what is happening in their area,” she added.

Before it closed, Mrs Gillick was involved in the running of the Baby Shop in Hill Street, Wisbech, which ran a pregnancy advice centre.

“We used to see up to 400 women a year and we felt we were helping to save babies’ lives,” she said. “It was a great sadness when we had to close, due to a lack of volunteers.”