Proponents of assisted dying need to understand that they will almost certainly get more than they say they want. You’ll have to assess whether they really are as moderate as they claim, or whether they expect – with good reason – that legalizing assisted dying will allow them to expand their scheme in ways that would horrify many now .
The campaign to legalize abortion on demand, in my opinion, was never honest about its true goals. Nor the similar campaign for euthanasia.
The reform of the abortion laws in 1967 was supposed to help a minority of women trapped by terrible circumstances and a brutal, merciless law for dangerous acts. In Britain the argument of security was paramount. This version is still current. The television series Call The Midwife has more than once included vivid, emotional and one-sided storylines in which the pre-1967 law is portrayed as unjustified, harsh, inflexible and even fatal.
Claims were made in the 1960s that between 50,000 and 250,000 women were at risk each year from botched illegal abortions. Such cases were tragic, but there is little evidence that these horrors were as common as claimed.
The television series Call The Midwife has more than once included vivid, emotional and one-sided storylines in which the pre-1967 law is portrayed as unjustified, harsh, inflexible and even fatal
In April 1966, the British Medical Journal carried a report from the Council of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. It argued from known figures: ‘If 100,000 criminal (including self-induced) abortions are carried out annually, this means that they have a mortality rate of only 0.3 per 1,000. The risk of criminal abortion has been determined to be high, so the known number of deaths suggests that the total number of such cases must be considerably less than claimed.’ The College also noted that ‘therapeutic’ abortions, based on the pre-1967 law, were carried out in significant numbers in NHS hospitals – 2,800 in 1962. Many more took place in private clinics.
Now legal abortions run to nearly 215,000 a year in England and Wales. They show no sign of abating despite (or perhaps because of) decades of sex education, easy availability of contraceptives and the ‘morning after pill’. Many abortions are now carried out with little medical intervention, using ‘pills by post’. And this enormous act – in which I believe a human life is destroyed – may very soon be freed from any further legal restraint. A planned amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, which has broad support among MPs, would abolish sections 58 and 59 of the Offenses Against the Person Act 1861 plus the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act. Its effect would be that “no offense is committed by a woman acting in connection with her own pregnancy”.
Even some liberals think this goes too far. I think this is a warning of how far euthanasia will go if we let it happen. Sir Keir Starmer promises what is called a free vote. That is, one where MPs do not need to tell voters what they plan to do before they do it. But they are under great pressure from liberal conformism to support euthanasia.
There is another worrying aspect. Until recently, at least, abortion advocates claimed that they believed that disposing of an unborn person was bad and should be uncommon. Its US supporters, notably Bill and Hillary Clinton, proclaimed in the 1990s that their aim was to make abortion ‘safe, legal… and rare’.
Interestingly, modern feminist advocates of abortion reject any suggestion that it should be “rare”. Amelia Bonow, a co-founder of the pro-abortion legal group Shout Your Abort, has said: ‘I can’t think of a less compelling way to advocate for something than to say it should be rare. And anyone who uses that phrase is operating on the assumption that abortion is a bad thing.’ In 2012, the US Democratic Party dropped the word “rare” from the abortion section of its official policy platform.
I suspect that in the case of abortion and euthanasia we are dealing with something much deeper than compassion for the suffering. A new anti-religion, the belief that above all else we should control our own bodies, has crashed into the space left by the death of Christianity. You’ll hear it all the time if you challenge any modern issue, from medication and abortion to the transgender movement: ‘What right do you have to tell me what to do with my own body?’
But in many cases, those who hold this view are putting themselves at risk, from drugs or from invasive medical procedures they may one day regret. The losers in almost all such cases are the immediate families of those involved. The law and society will no longer support them in any plea they may make.
This lends credence to the warnings of those who claim that euthanasia in this country will quickly replicate the appalling system in Canada. In 2022, this country ended the lives of 13,200 people a year, 4.1 percent of its annual deaths.
The unborn child lacks defenders when the case of abortion is raised. He or she has no voice and is considered not yet human by many pro-abortionists. But how much of a vote will the chronically ill have if it becomes legal to wipe them out?
Many feel guilty about the burden they place on their loved ones. As a society, we are woefully failing to provide the palliative care at the end of life which would surely be the best response to the unnecessary suffering visited upon so many in their final months.
But I think it’s worse than that. These changes are a retreat from Christian civilization to a Brave New World where everyone who gets in the way becomes disposable.
We have dehumanized the unwanted unborn and are dehumanizing the inconvenient old and sick. Who’s next?