by Philippa Stroud, First Things
Last month, after a mysterious eighteen-month delay, the U.K. government finally published the 2023 abortion figures for England and Wales. When adding in the numbers for the rest of the U.K., the figures revealed over 299,000 abortions took place across Britain in a single year, a new record. Almost one in three pregnancies in the U.K. now ends in abortion.
Such figures are hard to comprehend, so perhaps it helps to ponder that babies numbering the populations of Nottingham, Pittsburgh, or Venice are now being wiped out every year in the U.K. through abortion. In the context of our birth rate crisis, you do not have to be pro-life to find this profoundly unsettling. How have we got to this tragic point where so many human beings never see the light of day?
I would suggest the cause can be attributed to both legislative and cultural factors.
Legislation is often passed under the guise of responding to exceptional cases; yet, very quickly, it leads to normalization. So it has been with U.K. abortion laws, which permit abortion up to twenty-four weeks into pregnancy, double the most common time limit in mainland Europe.
On paper, abortion is only permitted in the U.K. in specific circumstances. However, the “mental health” grounds in the Abortion Act are now interpreted so broadly that we now have, de facto, abortion on demand up to twenty-four weeks in Britain. Abortion has been normalized via the legal interpretation of what was designed to be exceptional.
If that were not enough, however, in recent years there have been a succession of creeping further relaxations of U.K. abortion laws, often brought in via the back door through hasty amendments to unrelated government bills. One of the most disturbing of these was the introduction of the “pills by post” scheme, temporarily implemented in 2020 and then permanently in 2022, allowing women to obtain abortion pills without the safeguards provided by a prior in-person consultation with a medical professional. I, and many others, warned at the time about the likely effects of this scheme. These warnings have sadly proven prescient.