Abortion remains morally objectionable to many people, and not just Catholics. Science has revealed that life begins at conception and logic therefore dictates that abortion is not the taking of a “potential life” but of a real life. It is a fact which won’t go away.
Christians in particular are often uncomfortable about abortion because the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always taught additionally that it is wrong to directly and deliberately kill any innocent person. The Commandment “You Shall Not Kill” forbids it. Pope St John XXIII, the great pope of the Second Vatican Council, said abortion was an “unspeakable crime”, Pope St Paul VI upheld this traditional teaching as “unchanged and unchangeable” and Pope St John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, said abortion “always constitutes a grave moral disorder since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being”. Pope Francis often likens abortion to hiring a contract killer.
For conscientious Catholics like Dr Thérèse Coffey, the newly-appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary, such teachings will make abortion a grave matter indeed.
Others, on the other hand, don’t give a hoot about what the Pope says about anything and many of them prize abortion as an important milestone in the march of progress and a guarantee of absolute autonomy, a value which in the West has been almost elevated to the status of a deity. They include the many celebrities and rock stars, especially in the United States, who in recent years have begun celebrating their abortions in public while sometimes demonising those with whom they disagree. The right to abortion has become such an article of faith that when in June the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion up to birth a constitutional right, the scenes of public rage and hysteria were astonishing.
That abortion was not prohibited by the court made it all the more crazy. The judges merely returned to individual States the right to determine their own laws, gave power back to the people and made America, very much against the grain, a bit more democratic. It was a great decision.
Yet the UK media, like Boris Johnson, who bizarrely chose to criticise the ruling, obfuscated over the truth and misled the public generally over precisely what the ruling represented and why it was made. Now the appointment of Dr Coffey has generated the same kind of misinformation from the abortion industry and their allies, with Liz Truss herself also in the firing line for being somehow weak on the so-called “right” to abortion.
Leading the charge is the BBC which suggested almost immediately after Dr Coffey’s appointment that her voting record means she somehow represents a threat to access to abortion in the UK. She doesn’t. If only it were true. As a Catholic, Dr Coffey undoubtedly disapproves of abortions. But she is the Health Secretary and not an absolute monarch or a dictator with the power to do whatever she likes.
A substantial change to the law would require the assent of Parliament and the hijacking of the Health and Social Care Bill to retain the highly dangerous abortion pills in the post scheme, against the wishes of the Government, demonstrated earlier this year that any attempt to tighten it up would undoubtedly be defeated.
When Dr Coffey told Sky News that “abortion law isn’t going to change in this country” she was making an honest observation amid speculation that she will attempt to change laws under which more than 214,000 abortions were performed in 2021, the highest number recorded annually in England and Wales. So if no threat exists to abortion access, why pretend that it does?
Perhaps because the charities objecting to her appointment are in fact major abortion providers, organisations bloated on taxes channelled through the National Health Service, which pay their executives enormous salaries from the public purse, and which are growing increasingly bold in their attempts to dictate public policy.
Perhaps they are aggrieved because Coffey will uphold the law instead of changing it in the way they desire. They know that Coffey is not willing to decriminalise, further liberalise and generally deregulate a legal framework which is already among the most permissive anywhere in the world. For the last five years the abortion industry and its friends in Parliament have been campaigning hard for these objectives. They dream of abortion on demand and up to birth enshrined as a human right and now they’re upset because Coffey’s appointment means they can’t have more, easier and later abortions.
It is little a dent in the optimism shown by the industry since at least 2017 when Ann Furedi, then chief executive of British Pregnancy Advisory Service – the largest private provider of NHS abortions – declared in an article for Spiked that at that point, for the first time since Harold Wilson’s government passed the 1967 Abortion Act, MPs see “bending to pro-choice, rather than anti-abortion, opinion as expedient”.
“Many of us are humming along to that dodgy disco classic “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”. We are indeed on the move,” quipped Ms Furedi in a reference to the 1979 song by McFadden and Whitehead as she looked forward with relish to the victories yet to be won by Stella Creasy and Co.
So the ire articulated in media propaganda most likely reflects the frustration of the abortion barons and their pro-abortion ideologue allies in Westminster at having their advancing tanks temporarily trapped in the mud by the appointment of Dr Coffey when they thought nothing could stop them now.
Expect similar attacks from the proponents of assisted suicide and euthanasia, who have also detected a change in the tide in recent years and have been relentless in their campaign to legalise doctor-assisted death. They will not have the support of Dr Coffey either since she is firmly against doctors killing their patients and so will probably now have to wait until after the next General Election to launch an assault which would stand any chance of success.
If Coffey were able to tighten up the abortion laws she would, in fact, be more in tune with the wishes of the public given that polls show a majority of British women favour greater restrictions and that just one per cent want abortion up to birth (https://righttolife.org.uk/polling). One doesn’t have to be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to reach the conclusion that dismembering late-trimester foetuses – fully formed unborn babies – limb by limb or killing them by injecting them in the heart with toxins then delivering them as stillborn is profoundly and regressively barbaric.
Dr Coffey was right when nearly a decade ago she suggested that the UK really ought, at the very least, to come into line with other European democracies, like Germany, where abortions are permitted within only the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But the fact remains that she can’t do it and she isn’t going to.
So besides frustration with the status quo, what these attacks are really all about are her opinions. They demonstrate a lack of respect accorded to authentic human rights rather than those which have evolved (ie, made up to suit some destructive ideology or agenda). Genuine rights are not “sexual and reproductive” but include the freedom of religion, of conscience, of thought, speech and expression and of association.
The attacks on these rights are becoming the de facto equivalents of the Test Acts of the late 17th century when religious opinions were tested for conformity before a Catholic or nonconformist could either take any part in public life or avoid harsh financial and other penalties. They are concerned chiefly with sustained attacks on Christian morality and the value and sanctity of human life in particular, and like the Test Acts of old they mean that a person can be ruined for holding the “wrong” opinions.
Such vicious intolerance is now endemic. Britain is in the grip of a grave social evil which threatens our way of life. Ms Truss should seek to remedy this mischief with the urgency it demands and she will surely find that a great many people would support her if she sought to combat this most iniquitous aspect of the cultural revolution with the same vigour she seeks to deal with Russia or the rising cost of living.
(Simon Caldwell’s debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park, is out next month and is available to pre-order from this link: http://www.gracewing.co.uk/page416.html)
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