40 Years of Child Murder

Given that Gayle and I are now expecting our first child, the issue of abortion is one that is more pertinent to our lives than ever before. This week is the 40th Anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act, and since that date literally millions of children have been murdered in this country because of, for want of a better expression, social convenience.

Cranmer has this to say. You can read his full piece here but please be warned that it contains some very graphic pictures. (Frankly though, if you’re pro-abortion you shouldn’t even vaguely complain about the pictures of dead and maimed humans, because if you found them offensive, why do you support such actions?)

Cranmer would not like to speculate how many millions of babies have since been sacrificed on the modern altar of Molech (Lev 20:5; Jer 32:35), but he is content that those who were originally responsible for the Bill, those who have since condoned it, and all who have taken the decision to terminate a healthy pregnancy, will one day be answerable to God. And the cries of the unborn infants will then reverberate throughout the heavens, and perfect justice will be done.

So common now is the practice of abortion that the debate has largely ceased being about legalisation (pro-choice) versus prohibition (pro-life). Even the Roman Catholic Church in the UK has changed its previously absolutist position, with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and Cardinal Keith O’Brien calling for ‘achievable change in the law in the light of advances in medical developments, even if Parliament will not abolish the law’. All that remains to decide therefore, ‘in the light of medical advances’, is precisely a ‘foetus’ becomes ‘viable’; at what stage of development does the ‘foetus’ become a ‘baby’? Is this at 24 weeks, 22 weeks, 20 weeks, or less? We could get lost in the man-made minutiae of what constitutes a zygote, an embryo, or a foetus, but to God they are all babies (Jer 1:5; Ps 139:13), and their life is sacred.

But to talk of abortion on demand in the UK hardly does the prevalence justice. Setting aside Europe, which constitutes an unimaginable slaughter of meta-Sho’ah proportions, 200,000 abortions in England and Wales works out at 23 babies systematically killed every hour. If one factors in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the NHS terminates the life of a baby and cremates the body every two minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Or, put another way, the state legitimises the murder of a baby every single minute of a working day, and burns the evidence. Such a callous, systematic and efficient slaughter would leave even Hitler and Eichmann impressed. Indeed, having mentioned the altar of Molech, it is interesting to note that the term ‘holocaust’ is derived from the Greek holókauston, which referred to a completely (‘holos’) burnt (‘kaustos’) sacrificial offering to a god. That god is sex. The Western world is obsessed with it.

And now, with the development of drugs to do-it-yourself at home, these figures are quite possibly the last accurate snap-shot we shall be able to take. It is even more scandalous that it is the British taxpayer who pays for 80 per cent of abortions, and that the NHS spends a fortune on keeping premature babies alive which are born within the abortion time limit, but terminates far more viable babies (L. vita life). And the BMA wants to see even further deregulation, and are apparently supported by majority public opinion. They advocate that nurses and midwives should be able to carry out abortions. They also want to scrap the two-signature doctor requirement (- have they learnt nothing from the Harold Shipman case?), and to repeal the ruling that women may have an abortion only if it is in the best interests of their physical and mental health. Even more bizarrely, they also want to end the requirement that abortions may take place only in licensed clinics, opening up a free-for-all for a plethora of enterprising Vera Drakes.

I was convinced of the absolute wrongness of abortion in practically all circumstances by an argument put to me by a Roman Catholic during my time in Oxford. He asked a simple question – “Would there have been any time during Jesus’ gestation that to abort him would not also have been to abort (and murder) God?” And without wanting to get into the subtleties of incarnational Christology, the answer was of course “No”. “Aaaahhh”, went my RC friend. “Given that we believe in the hypostatic union, so the incarnate Jesus from conception was totally God and totally human, it wouldn’t have been moral or acceptable to abort the human Jesus would it. At this point I consulted my Thomas Weinandy on the communication of idioms and said “No”. “There you have it then”, said my friend. “Imagine any unborn child is Jesus and then consider whether it would be OK to abort”.

It’s a damn good argument and better still, it’s excellent theology because unlike most arguments on this issue, it’s not an anthropomorphic answer but a Christological one.

About the only reason Gayle and I can think of where we would consider an abortion would be if Gayle’s life was put in critical danger by the pregnancy and there was no other solution. This kind of thing happened to friends of mine and they went through that agonising choice. Other friends have brought to term children with developmental defects and other issues. I don’t think any of them even considered the possibility of getting rid of the child.

Yet every day, scores of women in this country go into abortion clinics and get rid of their children. So I want to know – can you think of any justification for knowingly having sex and then wanting to not take the responsibility of parenthood that comes with that? If so post a comment below.