With Abortions Up to Birth and Assisted Suicide, UK May Fully Reject Morality

It has been a hard month, watching the unfolding of laws in the United Kingdom that seem, as Macbeth intoned, to light “the way to dusty death.” This is said as an Irish American who fled to Europe after graduation from Notre Dame in 1974, not to visit the Emerald Isle (I got there two decades later with my younger daughter) but to see and study in the London of Pound, Eliot, Dickens, and Shakespeare. I was enamored of the literature and the London Fog (yes, I bought a raincoat by that manufacturer for the journey) and the Tower and Big Ben and everything else that had been conveyed to me in the English courses of my youth. Not even a near hit by an IRA mailbox bomb in South Kensington ruffled my desire to stay there for as long as the country would have me.

This Irishman loved Great Britain and its castles and cemeteries but, above all, the ambience of history in every corner of its cities and towns. I made the round of all the churches, museums, libraries, and cathedrals within reach of my strained budget, hitchhiking in a foreign land to save funds and to visit Salisbury and Coventry Cathedrals, Brompton Oratory and St. Paul’s, Oxford and Stratford, every other London shrine, and then, over the winter with a group of second-year Notre Dame law students, to Chartres, Mont St. Michel, Notre Dame in Paris, the Cathedrale of Notre-Dame de Bayeux, and more.

During my seven months there, the courtesy, even kinship, of the British people was evident to me. They were kind and knowledgeable about America. They were interested in my father’s service in the OSS in World War II, and one pubkeeper in particular pulled down the shades after closing time near Hurley-on-Thames, where my father had been stationed for a time, so we could have a last pint and talk about that era. I was a welcome guest and would have enjoyed a longer stay, conscious as I was that I was but a visitor to that country, enamored as I was, and was present at the sufferance of its citizens. That anyone has an attitude that they can enter a country and remain there without its permission stuns me still.

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I was in London to read literature on my own and fill notebooks with verse and observations from my 10-mile-walks in London neighborhoods. I had sought some refuge from the United States, where my college years had been spent as an amateur activist, working alongside a future congressman, the late Mark Souder of Fort Wayne, Indiana, to rally fellow students against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. We helped found on-campus groups at Notre Dame and elsewhere in the Midwest, eventually assisting with the creation of the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition (NYPLC). Try as I might to steep myself in literary pursuits and grab low-cost same-day tickets to performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company (I could not afford the show featuring Diana Rigg), I was always drawn back to the plight of the unborn and the injustice visited upon them and their mothers.

One day in London, I decided to drop by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) and inquire about their work. It was a fortuitous decision as one of their senior staff members befriended me, took me to a favorite pub of his I never would have found on my own, steeped me in the fight for life in his country, and then showed me around Parliament and Westminster Abbey. We were less than three decades from the end of World War II, and the history overwhelmed me.

In 1974-75, our countries were at the dawn of similar sea changes. Western Europe had emerged from the carnage of the war with a renewed dedication to the value of human life. The battlefields of Europe, the waste laid to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the toll of the concentration camps, and the ravages of the Nazi doctors had resensitized the Western nations to their Hippocratic tradition, leading the World Medical Association in 1948 to endorse the Declaration of Geneva, under which the physician vowed, “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.” Scarcely 20 years later, this commitment was fading internationally thanks to the spread of ideologies that ranged from raw eugenics to population control manias that saw human life not as a good but as a ruthless competition for a dwindling supply of resources in a dying world.

In 1967, the British Parliament passed the Abortion Act introduced by MP David Steel. The bill was backed by the Labour Government and was permissive in practice, though its terms required the certification by two physicians that an abortion before 28 weeks’ gestation was necessary to save the life of the mother or avert harm to her physical or mental health, or that of any of her family members. The camel’s nose was well into the tent with the 1967 Act, and the abortion toll grew rapidly, as it would half a decade later in the United States. According to data compiled by Johnston’s Archive, there were 851,466 births and 160 abortions in Great Britain in 1957. A decade later, there were 961,800 births and 27,200 abortions. Five years further on, the abortion total had increased sixfold, and since then the annual numbers have grown by more than 100,000.

The United States experienced an even more dramatic surge in abortions in the 1970s, increasing steadily until 1990 when it peaked at just above 1,600,000 lives lost. For a quarter century, under presidents of both parties, the abortion toll then declined. Now it has resumed an upward arc, fueled by the prevalence of chemical abortion and muddied by deteriorating data tracking, with annual abortions now exceeding 1,000,000. Half a century after the policies and laws of centuries were upended, the veneer of contention that national contraception and “safe sex” campaigns would lead to an era of wanted children and lower abortion rates has fallen away. If abortion is a morally neutral — or even good act — just standard health care, if the ending of pregnancy is just a mailed packet of pills away, if those pills are as safe as over-the-counter headache medicine, why should care be taken in relationships and abortion be eschewed?

In this environment, the policy choices in the British Parliament, and to a lesser degree in the United States, have been fairly predictable these past few months. On the abortion question, after only a brief debate, Parliament adopted a measure that further reduced protection for the lives of children before birth. In mid-June, the House of Commons voted 379-137 to bar prosecution of women for the death of a child — no matter what the stage of her pregnancy. The instant case involved a woman who had been charged with the death of her unborn child after taking abortion pills at 26 weeks. British law still allows the prosecution of doctors and others who aid abortions after 24 weeks, now two weeks later than some children can survive with care after delivery, but one MP, Stella Creasy, has voted to press on to exempt even these practitioners from liability. It may only be a matter of time until children before birth are a legal nullity in Britain, and all deterrence meant to protect them is lost.

Death has a way of coming in waves, as the breaching of one threshold encroaches upon and shatters others. So it is with assisted suicide, where an epic battle has raged in Great Britain for nearly a year. Opponents of MP Kim Leadbeater’s bill to legalize the practice waged a strong campaign that has slowed the measure and came close to defeating it at its Third Reading in the Commons on June 20. Again, as with the 1967 abortion act, the putatively liberal Labour Party took the lead on a bill that will deny a class of vulnerable human beings the assurance that they are equally valued and will be nurtured in hours of great need. The good news is that the bill dropped from a 55-vote majority in previous action to only a 23-vote margin at 314 to 291. It must now be considered in the House of Lords and could be shuttled back and forth between the two Houses if different versions are approved. The switch of another dozen votes would defeat the measure and allow the nation to chart another course and address identified defects in its system of care for the very ill under the National Health Service.

Meanwhile, as total abortions increase in the United States, New Yorkers await the decision of Governor Kathy Hochul (D) on a medical aid in dying bill pending after passage by the legislature. If she signs it, or allows it to become law without her signature, New York will become the 12th state, plus the District of Columbia, to allow assisted suicide. Advocates assert the law has safeguards, one of which is the two-physician requirement that was touted by legal abortion advocates as a way to safeguard against abuse of that statute. Now, of course, we have pills in the mail or over the counter, procedures that could make their way into an assisted suicide regime.

While some will insist there is no connection between these issues, the deterioration of respect for life at both of its edges, among its most vulnerable people, is part of a wave that has claimed millions of lives worldwide. Every unborn child at risk — the elderly and disabled urged to take their own lives — it is impossible to imagine a new Golden Age flourishing in such a soil. These are portentous days for our nations. The dust of death filters down all around us. Will its waves engulf us, or will we rally to reclaim the most precious of our rights?

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.

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