A total of 10.7% of all abortions in Bulgaria are carried out by girls under the age of 20, according to a major report based on EU data.

The report, circulated in the British media, shows that nearly a quarter of all abortions in Britain are carried out on girls under the age of 20.

The shocking figures, compiled by the EU, show British teenagers are far more likely than the average European youngster to have a termination, The Daily Mail notes.

The data, compiled by the REPROSTAT group, the EU's community health monitoring programme, details abortion figures across the region.

Most of the figures are for 2008, but the data is slightly older for several countries.

The report shows some 1.2 million terminations are carried out a year in the UK – the equivalent of the populations of member countries Malta and Cyprus combined. Breaking the figures down by age reveals that 22.1 per cent of all abortions carried out in the UK in 2008 were on girls aged under 20 – only in Belgium was it higher.

The abortion rate among British girls under 20 was 23.8 per 1,000. Only Estonia and Sweden had higher rates, at 24.1 and 24.4 respectively.

The French figure stood at 15.6 per 1,000 girls under 20 and the German at 6.2 per 1,000.

Of the countries which allow abortion, Poland, which has extremely tight legislation on the issue, had the lowest teen rate, of less than 0.1 per 1,000.

Greece, whose abortion laws are more similar to the UK's, had the next lowest, with 2.3 terminations per 1,000 women under 20.

The average rate in the EU was 14.1 per 1,000, while overall, every ninth abortion in the region was carried out on a teenager.

Among women over 35, though, the UK had one of the lowest rates of abortion.

In 2008, 4.3 in every 1,000 women in that age bracket had an abortion, accounting for 14 per cent of the 209,191 terminations carried out here.

This compares with Estonia, with 13.2 abortions per 1,000 women aged 35 and over, and Latvia with a figure of 12.8.

Ireland and Malta were excluded from the calculations, as abortion is illegal there. There was no data for Luxembourg, Austria or Cyprus.

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