A New Moral Rubicon for Britain

Abortion Up to Birth and Assisted Suicide Unto Death

A dark week in the sunshine.

In the space of three days the British government voted not only for (effective) abortion up to birth, but also for assisted suicide.

Yesterday’s “Alarmism” is Today’s Reality

At the start of this week, before the parliamentary votes had taken place, my line was that the mere fact that the British government was even discussing the possibility of allowing abortion up to birth already showed how far we had fallen.

It ought to be an unimaginable debate for a so-called civilised society, the kind that is usually written up in fictional dystopias and scoffed at as “alarmist” because “such a thing would never be allowed to happen.” This is why I thought (naïvely) that the existence of the debate alone was noteworthy enough. But then it actually got through, and by a significant margin too.

I’ve been in many debates with people on the “pro-choice” side before where, in order to show their “reasonable” side in arguing for abortion up to 24 weeks, they’ve said things like: “well, obviously, we’re not arguing for something like abortion up to birth; that would be ridiculous”. And just like that, it’s no longer ridiculous; it’s legal.

Although professional abortionists cannot legally “provide” late-term abortions (yet), the act of abortion itself by the would-be mother (e.g. a home abortion) has been decriminalised. This means it is now effectively “legal” to kill your own baby even as it is halfway through the birth canal, and face no criminal consequence. There need be no concern that we “might be” going down some future slippery slope. We’ve already gone down the slope. We’ve now crossed a new Rubicon for normative morality in Britain.

The “Expert” of the Law

Earlier in the week I was listening to BBC Radio 4 in the car, and was astonished to hear how they chose to speak about this proposed “amendment” to abortion law as if it was an obviously “good” idea, as though it was simply a case of tweaking an archaic practice that would lead to us becoming a more civilised society as a result.

They had a legal expert on who framed the amendments in terms of the presenting “problem” that in recent years there have been a number of “investigations” carried out against women who had late-term abortions beyond the 24-week legal limit, adding that, in some cases, “they were not only investigated but even sentenced”.

And...? What are the authorities supposed to do when someone has potentially killed a child when it's against the law to do so? Not investigate? Not bring them to sentencing? Why does the bringing-to-justice of immorally criminal behaviour lead to amendments in the law rather than amendments in behaviour and morality? This is what I mean when I say the mere “discussion” was itself already on immoral ground, let alone the eventual result of the vote.

As I listened to this “expert” speak, I awaited the obligatory snippet of “the other side of the story”, usually standard fayre, even just half a sentence from the host saying something like: “…but of course, there are some who oppose these amendments because they could lead to significant abuses, etc.” but there was nothing. It was as if there was no other way to think of this than the way it had been framed.

Even today, even with all the moral insanity in which our nation is drowning, it astonishes me to think of the millions of people who will have heard media coverage of those amendments and genuinely think they make moral sense.

They have been groomed to believe that these amendments are “just” and will lead to a more “civilised” society. They will genuinely think that the “problem” here is that the law convicts people who kill their unwanted children, rather than the problem being the people who kill their unwanted children.

As I’ve written about before, one of the major implications of the erosion of faithful Christian values in Church and society is the confusion caused over the relationship between crime, punishment, and justice.

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The existing abortion laws already were a problem, of course. They have led not to more restraint but more brazen advances for more and more “freedom” of choice and less and less protection for the unborn child. The level of permissiveness to be legally allowed to kill one’s own unborn children was barely imaginable even to those who agreed with the 1967 Abortion Act.

Even compared to that time, the Britain of today is barely imaginable. I believe our forebears of just one century ago would be utterly disgusted with what is now “lawful” today. How quickly a great nation can fall from grace when it abandons the foundations which gave it its great renown. We truly have crossed a new moral Rubicon in terms of what will now be deemed “normal”.

The Feminist Gaze

One of the reasons people have been so convinced by the need for the abortion amendment is the emphasis on the plight of women who may face the stress of having lost their child and being criminally investigated when they haven’t done anything wrong (e.g. a late miscarriage).

As genuinely awful as that is for those who have experienced it, it is nothing compared to the possibility of someone legally murdering their own child. Do we not think there is a woman out there potentially capable of that (who could then not be prosecuted by law)? One assumes it is a long time since Jeremiah was read in the House of Commons:

The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?

—Jer. 17:9

It was MP Tonia Antoniazzi who was one of the leading ministers for the amendment. It’s generally not good to judge on appearances, of course, but I’ll just say that she does look “the type”.

She has been referred to less affectionately—but not entirely inappropriately—as “The Minister for Infanticide” or by the more religious title, “The Chief Priest of Molech”. Amazingly, it was Antoniazzi who called on MPs to back the amendment on the basis of morality:

“I implore colleagues not to lose sight of the moral imperative here, namely vulnerable women being dragged from hospital bed to police cell on suspicion of ending their own pregnancies.”

What emotive language. “Dragged from their hospital beds?” What an image that presents. Is that really what was happening? Did police really do anything like “dragging women from hospital beds”? To a feminist-saturated culture, this is the perfect way to win support for a viewpoint. Those who disagree are then in the position of “agreeing” with the idea that already-traumatised women should be dragged out of hospital beds and dragged into a police cell.

I wonder if that’s the language Antoniazzi would use when referring to the women who pray silently outside the abortion clinics? Are they “dragged from their prayers to a police cell”? Or would she simply say, “Well, they were breaking the buffer zone law, which is already very clear…”? What about those who pray “illegally” because they are mourning near abortion clinics precisely because of the trauma of their own abortions? Where indeed is this “moral imperative” of which she speaks?

She went on to lament that women are “accused of breaking this law”. It’s about “protecting women and girls”, refusing to subject women to “traumatic criminal investigation”. The entire debate is couched in such a way as to literally avoid the moral imperative of the vulnerable unborn baby in the womb who is now objectively less protected as a result.

Most prominent feminists refuse to see this. Rebecca Reid, a feminist writer, wrote on X:

“The abortion debate is worse on here than I've ever seen it and I am too tired and pregnant to get into the trenches, but please don't be fooled that this is about 'aborting babies up to birth'. It is not. It's merely about decriminalising abortion. That's it.”

As I noted here, the battle is so often won or lost on descriptive language. Perhaps for their next magic trick, the feminists will tell us that we must repeal the “cruel” legislation that criminalises women who kill their newborn babies too? What’s a few seconds’ difference either side of the birth canal? It would not be called “decriminalising murder”; it would be called “extending abortion”.

When I then pressed Reid to ask whether she believed it was immoral for a woman to kill her baby for any reason whatsoever in the final trimester, she refused to say that it was outright immoral. She said that if a woman killed her baby for “non-medical” reasons, she would call it “a sad mistake” and “an act of desperation”, again putting all the emphasis on the woman’s suffering, rather than the suffering/death of the baby.

They Who Do Not Speak

If you sometimes wonder why Christians like me talk a lot about the problems of feminism, it's because our toleration of feminism is what ultimately leads to evils like this—not only the legislation, but the moralisation of the legislation and the demonisation of those who oppose it.

But our toleration of feminism goes deeper than that of paid-up pro-choice feminists. There are those who technically don’t agree with abortion but who say or do little or nothing to oppose it because they've been conditioned not to challenge the loud/angry/emotive women in the culture (or the churches). The result is that they feel they cannot speak strongly and clearly on issues of such moral urgency lest they cause offence, lest they be called "insensitive" or "misogynistic" or "unpastoral" as a result.

Rather than pushing back against these automatic assumptions, they have succumbed to them and have gone quiet at just the times they ought to have spoken most loudly and most clearly.

This set of conditions did not arise from nowhere. It is inseparable from the feminist narrative of “my body, my choice” which paralyses male leaders from feeling free to tell women something they don't want to hear. It also conditions many women to go against the maternal instincts God gave them, not least the reversal of the womb as a place of nurture to a place of potential destruction.

Assistance Unto Death

It really did feel like a kick in the national teeth to have the abortion amendment go through in such close proximity to the Assisted Suicide bill. They don’t call it “suicide”, of course. They never do call things what they really are anymore. Our moral decay is highly educated and far too sophisticated to describe bad things with moral accuracy.

I first wrote about that issue last year in The Secular Dystopia of "Assisted Dying", where I noted the fact that such a practice is highly compatible with the secular worldview: “there is a correlation between those who do not realise how serious death is, and those who do not realise how serious life is.” Secularism is not neutral. It bears a certain kind of fruit in society. It places a certain kind of value on human beings which differs from those who see human beings as created in the image of God.

I was in London on the day of the vote, attending a Christian Concern rally at Parliament Square. The sun was shining on those glorious buildings of what was once the most influential city on planet earth. But this was not a day of glorious light. It was a day of darkness masquerading under the veneer of light.

I was due to give a short speech but we ended up in a time of corporate prayer instead. (Among other things, the event was a good ecumenical reminder that, for all their theological “litter”, Pentecostals certainly know how to pray with faith and fervour!).

We knew that, unlike the abortion vote, this one would be very close. It was quite tense as we all awaited news from inside the House of Commons.

When the result came through (a narrow “win” for the bill by just 23 votes), we were, of course, disappointed. But in another sense, it “made sense”. Not that I wasn’t fervently amening the prayers of my Pentecostal brethren to see the bill fail, but I had the sense that this might well be God’s judgement upon us, a “giving us up” to the outcome of our national desires (cf. Rom. 1), and perhaps also a judgement upon the societally lethargic church of this nation (to say nothing of the “established” church of this nation).

There was a rather different response, of course, from the rival activists at Parliament Square on the day. We heard loud shouts from the Humanists UK camp, whose leaders and supporters rejoiced at the news of the vote as if lives had been saved. They described the outcome as “a landmark victory for compassion, dignity, and choice”.

However sensible, enlightened, and progressive it may like to sound, however nice its adherents happen to be, however ignorant or ill-informed the motives of this or that individual, the fruit of secularism as a worldview is not “neutral”; it is evil. It seeks to displace God and put humanity on the throne. Humanism not only cannot save; it is the essence of self-idolatry, of worshipping ourselves in place of the God who gave humans dignity in the first place.

A Wake-Up Call

For too long we have let this nation slide away into secular apathy and moral oblivion. My hope and prayer in light of this week is that God uses these atrocious political decisions to awaken the people of Britain to prayer, repentance, and action to bring life to this culture of death.

This week is not an isolated incident. It is not a coincidence. It is not a break from the norm. It is the long term fruit of the Church failing to be a city on a hill and a light to the nation, failing to stand up for righteousness and justice in the land, forgetting that “righteousness exalts a nation” (Prov. 14:34). When you become too afraid or too cautious to meaningfully and consistently push back against the darkness over several decades, don't be surprised at what happens to the state of your nation.

In order for Britain to wake up, we need the Church to wake up. May she loose her bonds of cowardice and be clothed with new strength from on high—and may the nation know about it.