Why are major moral issues such as abortion totally absent from British elections?
by Greg Swenson, Conservative Home:
Last Thursday, the starting gun was fired on the US election campaign as Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate. The debate took place 24 hours after the final head-to-head debate here in the UK between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.
There will of course be many similarities between these overlapping campaigns. The themes that have dominated the British campaign – the economy, Ukraine, tax, the scale of immigration and healthcare – can be expected to feature in my home country. These issues are global problems shared across the developed world.
And yet one major issue in the upcoming US campaign has been absent from discussion over here: abortion.
Abortion is a significant issue in every US election cycle but, with November’s election being the first since the repeal of Roe v Wade, it is set to take on greater prominence this year.
Of course for the leaders of the major British political parties, it will probably be a great relief that they are not likely to be asked their views on a law that means our abortion time limit is double that of the average in EU countries.
And yet, abortion ought not to be omitted from our political discourse. Just a few days after the Prime Minister announced the general election, the Government published the latest annual figures that showed that in 2022, for the first time, over a quarter of a million abortions had taken place in England and Wales in a single year.
This astonishing statistic, unknown to many people who still assume abortion is and ought to be, at best, relatively rare, went by almost unnoticed.
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