Nothing to celebrate: 50 years of abortion in Britain

An incredible 9 million lives have been lost.

Philippa Taylor | Oct 30 2017 | comment

Last Friday marked 50 years since the passing of the UK’s Abortion Act, 1967, which permitted abortion on very wide grounds. In these last five decades nearly 9 million unborn babies have been aborted in England, Scotland and Wales.

That figure has, of course, also impacted the lives of 9 million women, some of whom are celebrating this anniversary of the Act while many will instead remember and regret their abortion(s) and the harm each one brings to both mother and child.

While I strongly believe there are two victims for every abortion, for now I deliberately focus on the unborn victims, not the women, and the almost incomprehensible scale of destruction of innocent lives.

Nine million lives lost is a truly staggering figure.

It is more than all the pupils currently at in schools in England
It is more than the whole population of Austria
It is more than the population of New York
It is more than the combined population of the 22 largest cities in the UK after London
It is more than 10% of the entire UK population

Incredibly, that number of lives lost is higher than the combined populations of Scotland and Wales (see also here).

Let’s break the figures down a bit more.

On current abortion rates, every year we lose more lives than could fill three London Olympic Stadiums(approximately 200,000 per year).

Every month we lose the equivalent of 11 Titanics (over 16,000 per month, since 1992).

We lose many more than the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks every week in England, Wales and Scotland (3840 per week).

And every day the number of unborn babies who are aborted would completely fill an Airbus A380(approximately 550 per day).

These are illustrations of the numbers of lives lost. Imagine the difference in England and Wales if those were all alive today? Which brings me to Northern Ireland where, in a poignant and striking contrast, there are an estimated 100,000 people who are alive today because they do not have the 1967 Abortion Act, but have a different law.

In other words, one in ten people under fifty in Northern Ireland are alive because of the more restrictive law on abortion there.

This number could fill their national football stadium five times over. Each one a precious, valuable human being who is alive today but would have never have had the chance of life in the rest of the UK.

An anniversary is a time for stopping to remember something very special or something very sad. It is either a celebration, such as of a marriage or a special birthday, or it is a time to commemorate a tragic event, such as a death.

I for one know which this 50th anniversary will signify: 9 million innocent lives lost. For me it is a time for commemoration of 9 million unborn children who have silently disappeared.

Please take a minute or two to stop and remember, by watching this short video we have put together at CMF to mark the Anniversary.

Philippa Taylor is Head of Public Policy at Christian Medical Fellowship. She has an MA in Bioethics from St Mary’s University College and a background in policy work on bioethics and family issues. Republished from the CMF blog with permission.

October 30, 2017

Tomorrow brings that ubiquitous American festival, Halloween, which increasingly makes itself Down Under. Zac Alstin laments this development and has posted his theses against it. “Halloween in Australia is profoundly meaningless, deeply inauthentic,” he writes. “On the other hand, an increasing number of Australians feel like doing it… And what could be more authentically Australian than people doing what they want, because they enjoy it?” What indeed.

Today, however, is National Cat Day in the United States and that is an observance I could live with if it reached this part of the world. The US Poetry Foundation alerted me to it via today’s poem (they send one every day) by Christopher Smart, an 18^th century gentleman who was better at experimenting with poetry than providing for his wife and children, sad to say.

Amongst a number of pieces in a collection called Jubilato Agno is a delightful poem about his cat, somewhat Biblical in style and explicitly Christian in its worldview (he had been intended originally for the Church). Here are the opening lines:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself…

The rest is here, for the enjoyment of all cat lovers.

We are getting in early with our Scrooge-like take on Halloween because we are ahead in time and also because there will not a newsletter tomorrow. For the time being we are cutting back to three newsletters a week: Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Happy Halloween, if it’s your thing!