The decriminalization of abortion up until birth in the United Kingdom passed this week by a margin of 379 in favor to 137 opposed after a debate of only 46 minutes and just a handful of speeches. Labour MPs cheered when the vote passed.
“For years, I’ve heard British people say, with a tinge of pride, ‘Well here we don’t have culture wars over abortion, unlike in the United States,’” Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule wrote. “Maybe you should have had them.”
Vermeule is right. The United States is the only Anglosphere nation with a national abortion debate that resulted, after a half-century, in the U.S. Supreme Court stating in Dobbs v. Jackson that “Abortion is not a constitutional right.” That line was the contention of hundreds of thousands of activists fighting for decades while facing the contempt of mainstream culture; now, it is the position of the highest court in the land.
Even many Christians in Anglosphere countries have tended to sneer at the brawling culture war politics of the United States (while the pro-lifers often envy the vibrancy of the American movement). But the United Kingdom has now received a rude awakening with the abrupt, deliberate embrace of infanticide by politicians who, in our age of ultrasounds, sonograms, and growing ability to keep premature babies alive, did so in full knowledge of what they were doing.
With the decriminalization of abortion until birth, there has been a sudden crack in the façade that the culture had carefully constructed around feticide. Gone are the soothing euphemisms and the language of “reproductive rights.” Instead, an unprecedented number of horrified Britons are calling this barbarism precisely what it is: killing babies.
“The day U.K. Parliament voted to make it lawful to kill a baby for any reason, including for sex-selection, at any point up to and during birth, was the day Britain forfeited its claim to be civilized,” longtime pro-life champion Lord David Alton wrote.
“Killing babies is not a ‘healthcare choice,’” concurred Lord Daniel Moylan. “Ghastly.”
“I voted no,” said MP Ben Obese-Jecty. “I am pro-choice, but can scarcely believe that after just 46 rushed minutes of backbench debate in which only 13 MPs gave speeches, Parliament voted to decriminalise abortions of healthy babies up to full-term.”
“Disgusting,” said MP Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform Party UK. “Labour cheered as they voted to become the party of baby killers. SICK.”
“Having voted for infanticide tonight (by a huge majority) our Parliament may later this week vote for assisted suicide in pods,” said former MP George Galloway. “This is today’s Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“The U.K. already has the latest cut-off point for abortion in Europe,” wrote Allison Pearson, a prominent British columnist. “24 weeks is ‘horrible for all concerned,’ a doctor told me. Horrible for mum, baby, and medical staff. Now, it’s up to birth. Murdering babies. Where is our moral compass?”
“We’ve voted to kill our old, our sick & our infants,” Andrew Lilico of the Telegraph concurred. “We deserve everything that’s coming to us.”
“One has to conclude that Labour just really, really like killing people: young, old, sad, disabled,” said columnist Nina Power. “Anyone, anywhere, for no reason at all! Morte! Morte! They’re like the Aztecs with spreadsheets.”
“Let there be no ambiguity here, or hiding behind the language of ‘decriminalisation’ – it is now legal to abort a child up until the moment of birth in Britain,” wrote Sebastian Milbank of The Critic. “What a desperately stupid and wicked country we have become.”
Professor Kathleen Stock, a feminist activist and lesbian, also said the quiet part out loud. “You may not be able to know or say at what precise point some grains make a heap but you still know unambiguously when you can see a heap,” she wrote. “Same goes for cells, and for baby. Late-term abortions kill babies. Viable babies.”
They’re all correct – every one of them. There was some opposition to this horror, and still is. Over 1,000 medical professionals urged MPs to reject it. Only 1 percent of women supported it. Some Members of the House of Lords have already promised to fight the bill tooth and nail.
But Tuesday was an apocalypse of sorts – a revelation. The handful of noble Britons who have been tirelessly fighting the culture of death for decades could have used allies in their lonely culture war, and every slippery slope argument they made proved true. They are currently enduring the worst nightmare of all prophets: seeing their awful visions realized.
If you do not fight culture wars for the lives of the vulnerable, you lose the culture, and the vulnerable die. Nobody – especially not those pro-abortion elites suddenly horrified by the specter of cheers in Westminster for murdering babies – can deny that now.
