Pope John Paul in his book ‘Memory and Identity’ published in Italy early this year, made a comparison between the deaths caused by abortion and the deaths caused by the Holocaust. The ensuing media uproar among commentators and letter writers criticised the pope for making that comparison and for even just linking abortion and holocaust. His critics expressed their feelings that ‘Holocaust’ should be reserved exclusively to describe the Shoah – the attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews by Hitler. The comparison however is too important to get lost in semantic argument among interested parties. As we approach October 27, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Abortion Act of 1967, a look at some statistics might help to clear our minds to grasp what John Paul was talking about.
Scoffers like to parrot Disraeli and state that there are lies, damned lies and statistics, but sadly the number of abortions from 1968 onwards, culled from the Office of National Statistics and presented coldly and unemotionally, makes truly depressing reading. The number of abortions in 1968 carried out on legal residents in the United Kingdom was 22 332. In 2004, the latest year for which numbers are available, the figure was 199 458. The overall conclusion is that on average, numbers of abortions are increasing and show no signs of slowing down, having accumulated a total of over 6 000 000.
There’s little doubt that the sex-drenched 60’s with their aggressive demands for freedom at any and every cost paved the way and smoothed the path for the professional politicians who passed the Abortion Act. 1967 was not their first attempt to get this legislation on the lawbooks, but it was the successful one, and from the perspective of nearly forty years on, it has become clearer that parliamentary time was made to ensure that it was passed. The result of their efforts have been that the life of a child in a mother’s womb has become more and more dangerous, and that over nearly two decades, the gap between pro-choice people ie those who agree with abortion and pro-life people – those who don’t, has grown wider. Unfortunately it has grown more and more unbridgeable and the by-products of this gulf have had unexpected repercussions for our society.
One of these has been the law of unintended consequences, though aficionados of conspiracy theory might disagree with the use of unintended. As a society we have almost completely shrugged off as outdated the imperatives of most of the moralities that were prominent in the nurturing and upbringing of children in the early twentieth century. One result of this has been that in the pro-choice mindset, an unborn child is a non-person until it is born, despite the unassailable evidence of movement and the use of scans to indicate life signs. Only when delivered from the womb does it somehow become a child with human rights, but while unborn it lacks such rights and remains the property of its owner who can decide whether or not it will be allowed to live or to be aborted.
Another consequence is that much of our present sexual chaos can be traced back to 1967. The Abortion Act was the first real breach in the sexual dam and emphasised the realisation that sexual activity could be carried out without too much consideration for the outcome – a kind of law of negative consequences. The results have been like releasing a family of genies from the sexual bottle, with very little hope of ever getting them back in again. The collateral damage involved in the rolling out of the sexual revolution makes depressing reading too, for it has taken those four decades to surface clearly in the social pool. Over the last decade for example, sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea have increased by 112%, chlamydia by over 200% and syphilis by over 1000%, never mind the rise and rise of AIDS.
Yet another result of 1967 has been the extension of pro-choice values to the end of life. ‘The Universe’ reports regularly on the strenuous efforts that eminent politicians in both Lords and Commons make to ensure that euthanasia becomes a legally accepted practice. Their arguments ultimately and eventually come down to what has become the core of abortion justification – a woman can say, ‘It’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it.’ Put it another way: what abortion and now euthanasia supporters mean is, ‘I support the right to choose, so I support the right to kill.’
Anniversaries are suitable times to reculer pour sauter mieux, to step back to jump forward better. We live in Britain now in a faith and morals archipelago. Belief has ebbed away leaving residual groups of committed believers dotted around the country. These have to ask themselves to what exact extent they have a responsibility to oppose the immoral and amoral laws that our legislators and interest groups impose upon us all. They have to ask too, now that most of the avenues of Christian influence of the past have Road Closed signs set up at them, how determined they are to take on pro-abortion activism and maintain opposition to it in whatever way they can. The challenges have not gone away. Instead they are more sophisticated and subtle. The morning after pill for example, road tested in Scotland this year, allows a DIY abortion at home, not in back streets, calling into question the legal requirement that abortion can only be carried out in approved premises.
Earlier this year, Simon Weisenthal, a man who dedicated himself to bringing to justice SS personnel who carried out Hitler’s Holocaust of the Jews so enthusiastically, died. Some years ago, Weisenthal was asked about his attitude to what he doing. He replied, ‘I believe in God and the world to come. When each of us comes before the six million, we will be asked what we did with our lives….I will say, I did not forget you.’ We can say the same for our dead children.
