This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.

Learn more Got it!

Britain’s horrifying full-term abortion vote

Kneecap rapper Mo Chara being bailed over a terror charge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court seems to be the only news of significance which made its way onto the Irish airwaves from London today. Much more hushed is the development that a majority of MPs at Westminister last night voted to effectively open the door wide to infanticide, through the decriminalisation of abortion throughout all nine months. 

The media bedlam over the Kneecap charge stands in stark comparison to the interest generated over a vote which is, by the standards of any reasonable and thinking person, horrifying.  The change in the law, while it does not decriminalise doctors or anyone else providing assistance for late-term abortions for non-medical reasons, means that women will not be prosecuted for carrying out their own late-term abortions.

Commenting on the vote, a statement provided by abortion provider Marie Stopes International UK read:

“We are delighted that elected MPs voted for this landmark reform to abortion law. We fought hard for this reform and we’re proud that Parliament listened.   
“Once this reform is signed into law, no one will face invasive criminal investigations into their medical history and personal life following an unexplained pregnancy loss. No one will face prison for ending their own pregnancy. “


I was glad to see one of the few pro-life female politicians in Britain, Miriam Cates, who is now a former MP after losing her seat at the last general election, reacting with refreshing honesty to the vote on a segment on GB News. Presenter Patrick Christys was visibly low-key shocked and even appalled as Cates, a mother of three, said it was hard to look at the abortion of a full-term, or almost full-term baby, as anything other than murder.

Christys seemed to struggle with the extraordinary reality of the news, asking Cates: “Am I wrong about this? If you wanted to abort your child at eight months, three weeks, you could do it?”

   

“Yes,” the former MP said. “A woman would be lawfully allowed to terminate her own pregnancy at eight months, or even nine months, or even during birth, and not face criminal prosecution.”

Christys sighed as Miriam Cates continued to explain how the amendment had been quietly introduced to an unrelated Bill.

“I think a lot of people are pretty shocked that MPs have done this. Just one per cent of the public support abortion to birth. It wasn’t in anybody’s manifesto – nobody talked about this before the election, and a couple of MPs have introduced this amendment into a Bill that is completely unrelated, a Bill about policing and crime.”
“Do you think they [late term abortions] are murder, or infanticide?” presenter Christys further probed. “I think it’s hard to conclude otherwise because the moment a baby is born, if you kill that baby, you would be in prison for life,” Cates rightly answered. “It doesn’t make biological or ethical sense that moments before that, you could kill that same child and it would be ethical or lawful.”


The former Conservative MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge highlighted that late-term abortions have increased drastically in other jurisdictions where the law has been decriminalised, including in New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, and Canada.

Christys’s face scrunched up in discomfort as the former politician described what actually has to happen in the scenario – and how attempts to abort the baby in the womb (with a lethal injection which stops the heart) are not always successful, and there are incidents of babies being born alive. This has been recorded in Ireland. The saddest part of it all is that in a society where abortion is legal, these kinds of horrors don’t even make the news.

The vote to allow abortions for any reason, through all nine months, in the name of not criminalising women, took place after less than two hours of debate. It was the first time that the abortion amendment had even been debated in the House of Commons, which explains why such a seismic law change attracted so little attention. 379 people backed the amendment by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, vs 137 against.

Julia Lopez MP bravely told the British Parliament that the House had a duty to consider both mother and baby. “It is not extreme or anti-women to say that a baby matters too,” she said, warning of the “real world consequences” for the most vulnerable in the real world.


“It is not extremist to want protections for viable babies. It is not anti-women to say that coercion or dangerous self-medication should not be outside the reach of the law,” the Conservative MP added to the scowls of Labour’s Stella Creasy.



On Twitter, people clamoured to get their heads around what this really means. One London based male photographer summed up the sense of perplexity when he wrote:

“What the actual f**k just happened? I heard no talk of it, nobody demanding it, no debate and then suddenly, boom, you can murder a baby as it’s born. I totally agree with being allowed an abortion as the law was, but killing a full grown baby? Who wanted this? It’s terrifying.”

Has Britain really lost its moral compass to the point where this passes as compassion? Despite the grimness of the vote, the hard-line position of full decriminalisation in all circumstances does not have the support of the public, as Cates pointed out in the interview above. Take polling conducted this month – more than 2,100 adults were polled by Whitestone Insight between 2nd and 3rd June. Just three per cent of women, when asked “What do you think the [abortion] time limit should be for Britain?” answered that it should be “extended to birth.” It has been noted that that is the exact same percentage of Labour voters who agree with the abortion to birth amendment. 

What the polling also shows is that introducing ‘abortion up to birth’ was at the very bottom of a list of twenty possible priorities they wanted the House of Commons to pursue over the next year. A mere one in 50 people said it would be a preferred area of focus.

And it’s not just women who are opposed. A gap has been widening between men and women on the issue of abortion, after years of men being berated into believing they are not allowed to have an opinion, despite children being half theirs. A major Gallup survey from the States recently found that 54 per cent of American men now identify as pro-life, compared to just 32 per cent of women.  

IPSOS polling published on 16th June, just one day before Westminster’s stunning vote, found that 46 per cent young men aged 16-34 believe that abortion should be legal “in most or all cases.” The survey, which took place from 16th to the 19th May surveyed 1,062 British adults, with the support for abortion among young men much lower than the overall figure of 71 per cent of Britons who believe that abortion should be allowed “in most or all cases.” But the impact of sixty years of legalised abortion is clear to see through the polling, with a tiny four per cent telling the survey they believe abortion should not be legal at all. A higher proportion, 34 per cent, said that abortion should be legal “in all cases.”

The poll did reveal, however, little will to extend the 24-week time limit for abortions in England and Wales (a point at which babies have survived) – with 24 cent saying that the limit was too late, while just four per cent thought it was too early, again indicating the sheer lack of support for this Bill.

But you don’t need polling to tell you that certain things are wrong, and should not be accepted in a civilised and compassionate society. Yet what the polling does tell us is that abortion extremists, who proclaim the wonders of ‘choice’ and autonomy at the expense of basic human decency and empathy for tiny babies, are vastly out of touch with their constituents.

You’ll also hear that these late-term abortions, which already happen in Ireland for disability (and have happened in dreadful cases of misdiagnosis) are rare. But there are already around 260 abortions a year in England and Wales performed on babies over 24 weeks. As campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce put it, that’s one late-term abortion every single working day. Antoniazzi estimates that the law change will affect one per cent of all abortions, as if this is some justification for killing full-term children. It’s only right to point out that one per cent of the over 250,000 abortions performed in England and Wales in 2022 – and the yearly figures show no sign of slowing – is 2,500. 

It’s clear that there is an appetite, nearing the maniacal, from a very small number of extreme, out of touch, female MPs to ensure Britain can boast the most liberal abortion regime in the world. It is, whatever way you look at it, a cult of death that has taken a firm grip on politics in the UK and in Ireland. No doubt, the extremists who sit among the Dáil benches, will, in a spirit of vindictive competition for all the ills of our past, be clamouring to follow suit. It doesn’t matter if you can’t get the public onboard. It’s all in the playbook – elevate the same old frivolous news stories and PR stunts over things that really matter and label those who express even a hint of opposition as being anti-woman.

There is a cruelty to it all – but we should not be surprised at the cruelty of those who think it perfectly legitimate to kill a baby six or eight or nine months into a pregnancy. We should not be surprised that our politicians care very little about the rest of us when they are ready and willing to accept such naked barbarism.

  

Maria Maynes

       

   

This article was first published on Gript and is printed here with permission

   

back to blog

Featured