Men For Life

My Speech for March For Life UK at Victoria Square, Birmingham, 27th Apr 2025

The silencing of men on abortion suits cowardly men all too well. But things can change.

“How dare you?!”

“What kind of a monster are you?”

“Why are you obsessed with controlling women’s bodies?”

“Why do you want to stamp out their chance at happiness and fulfilment?” “How dare you…”

These are just some of the reactions men today have faced, will face, and to some extent, must face, if they are to challenge abortion in a feminist-saturated climate like ours.

As often with great evils, magic words are used to mask the true reality, to make it seem that what is happening is not really happening behind the magic curtain, within the magic buffer zone. When a woman is pregnant and intends to have the baby, even in the early stages that little person in their womb will be referred to by medical professionals as “the baby”. At the flick of a fairy mother’s wand, however, those same medical professionals will stop referring to that same little person as “the baby”, and refer instead to “the pregnancy” (which may then be more palatably “terminated”) or—that deliberately ugly word—the “foetus” (which may then be more palatably “aborted”).

The men in our time are so often cowed onto the side-lines in the debates over these subtle evils. I was a young teenager when I first learned about what abortion really entailed. I was not a Christian at the time, but my RE teacher was, and I thank God that he risked censure by telling his pupils what abortion actually means, and what it may actually require, forceps and all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that that male teacher was eventually “streamlined” from the school. That’s often the “nice” way of telling someone their employment has been, well, “terminated”.

When I later went to university and the subject of abortion came up in a seminar, I had never before experienced the vitriol that would be vigorously torpedoed towards any male who dared to speak against this sacred act of womanly freedom. “No womb, no opinion”. Sadly, for too many men today, this arrangement suits them just fine. It gives them a perfect excuse to be cowards by claiming to be the “white knights” of women’s liberation, absolving themselves of any responsibility to speak and act as they ought in the face of so great an evil, the greatest evil of our time.

There were men in former times who knew different. Men with bigger hearts and stronger spines. One such man, of whom all men in our nation should be proud, was William Carey, the influential missionary who went to India in 1793. What Carey found in India appalled him. Widowed women, whose lives were seen as effectively pointless once their husbands died, were burned alive on funeral pyres. It was just “the done thing”… It’s just “what happened”… It was just “part of the culture”… “It’s more nuanced than it sounds…” “Anyway, it would be too complicated to try and challenge it”...

Well, Carey did challenge it. And today, widow-burning is still illegal.

In other parts of India in Carey’s time, women were told that in order to safeguard their future fertility, they must offer their first baby as a sacrifice to the river goddess by literally throwing their baby into the river to drown. I remember reading a book with my young son a few years ago which quoted Carey’s incredulous response to this: “Why should babies be thrown into the river year after year?” What an absurd question to even have to ask. How could anyone ever think that was a good thing to do? And yet it happened, year after year, until that man again stood up and challenged it. “Why should babies be thrown into the river year after year?” A sensible question indeed.

Is this so different to what we in our apparently more “civilised” modern society call “abortion”? Perhaps there is no river goddess lording it over the women of our age, but don’t be fooled by the clinical technical terms (and laws) we’ve invented to salve our consciences. We still very much pay homage to the “goddesses”. Feminism is one of the most powerful idols of our time. You can usually tell by how angry its adherents become whenever you dare to tread on their sacred ground. The shrine-keepers of this idol promise women career advancement, personal freedom, social status, economic prosperity, all at the mere cost of that inconvenient little “parasite” growing in their womb (known to more civilised societies as “a baby”).

It doesn’t happen in public at the riverside anymore. It happens behind the heavily buffered barricades of clinics, safely protected from absurdly sensible questions like Carey’s, and even, as Isabel Vaughan-Spruce knows all too well, from our prayers.

Why should babies be thrown into the river year after year? Because there have been too few men like Carey willing to face the flak from the goddess worshippers who believe that supporting abortion is an “enlightened” moral position, painting those who oppose it as evil misogynists fresh out of The Handmaid’s Tale.

In Carey’s time, the flak he received also came from his fellow countrymen, including those in the East India company of the British Empire, who did not want missionaries like him opposing the “local customs”, however evil they happened to be. “It’ll be bad for business”, they said.

It continues to be bad for business. That’s why so many men keep quiet.

“Well, at least it’s not our children…”

“Who are we to challenge it, anyway?”

“Is it really our place to tell them it’s wrong?”

“What about the optics?”

“What about my reputation?”

“What will my boss say?”

Men in our time must confront the cowardly excuses that keep them silent, year after year. In love, they must stop caring about the unloving names the feminists (male or female) will call them. They must care far more about the opinion of the true God who gave life to them—and the many littler women (and littler men) who so desperately need their help, and who, unlike those babies in the river, no one will ever hear cry.