Exploiting a crisis: COVID-19 & Abortion in the UK
by Peter Williams
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chief of Staff for Barack Obama, once said
“Never allow a good crisis go to waste”.
As someone who, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was so ideologically extreme that he voted against a federal ban on partial-birth abortion in 2003, and whose record earned him a 100% rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), he would no doubt be delighted to learn that the British abortion lobby has taken his advice entirely on-board.
From the inception of the Government’s efforts to contain COVID-19 by the creation of extraordinary emergency powers and civil contingencies, the abortion lobby have seized the chance to further their agenda of making abortion practice more and more permissive, and undermining the few right-to-life protections for unborn children, and pregnant mothers, that exist in UK law.
Over the week when the Coronavirus Bill was introduced in Parliament, leading figures from the Royal Colleges and human rights groups long since infiltrated and co-opted by abortion campaigners, as well as abortion lobby groups and providers themselves, sent a letter to Matt Hancock MP (Con; West Suffolk), the Secretary of State for Health, asking for abortion procedures to be relaxed so that women seeking abortions could have remote consultations and be sent the abortifacient mifepristone by post, having chemical abortions in their homes. (Mifepristone cuts the biological connection between an unborn child and her mother, causing the baby to suffocate and starve to death. Hancock had already legalised the use of misoprostol, the second drug which causes the lifeless remains of the baby to be expelled from the womb, at women’s homes last year.)
On the 23rd of March, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) released statements (since deleted) saying that they would make precisely those changes, but then reversed themselves later that day, saying it was an “administrative error”. This suggests either an in-Government struggle over this policy or a too-early release of what was already planned.
Despite this apparent setback, the next day saw attempts by pro-abortion MPs Jonathan Ashworth (Lab/Co-op; Leicester South), Ruth Cadbury (Lab; Brentford & Isleworth), and Wes Streeting (Lab; Ilford North) on behalf of his colleague Jess Philips (Lab; Birmingham, Yardley), to put pressure on Hancock to U-turn again. To this, he repeatedly stated that there were “no proposals to change the abortion rules due to COVID-19”, or “as part of the COVID-19 response”.
Meanwhile, that same day, as the Coronavirus Bill passed through the House of Lords, abortion activists Baroness Barker and Baroness Bennett tabled amendments that if passed would have even more significantly altered abortion regulations, not only allowing the relaxations asked for in the abortion lobbyists’ letter but:
Allowing not only doctors but nurses and midwives also, to certify any abortion on any grounds, including on grounds up to birth.
Reducing the number of individuals needed to certify an abortion from two to only one, if two would be “impractical” or “involve undesirable delay” for the abortion to take place.
Not extending the Abortion Act’s conscience clause, so that no medical professional would be able to conscientiously object to formal involvement in abortion.
This effort was defeated, as the Government opposed the amendments. Lord Bethell, speaking as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the DHSC, gave an excellent account as to the safety and safeguarding concerns that make allowing such a permissive situation such a terrible idea, such as:
“Do we really want to support an amendment that could remove the only opportunity many women have, often at a most vulnerable stage, to speak confidentially and one-to-one with a doctor about their concerns on abortion and about what the alternatives might be? The bottom line is that, if there is an abusive relationship and no legal requirement for a doctor’s involvement, it is far more likely that a vulnerable woman could be pressured into have an abortion by an abusive partner”.
Quite so. This was an enlightened, compassionate, and insightful intervention.
Less than a week after this, however, and despite his having stated starkly that “[t]here are no proposals to change the abortion rules due to COVID-19” in the Commons, Health Secretary Matt Hancock issued approvals introducing precisely what pro-abortion MPs had asked for under the powers granted to him by the Abortion Act 1967, without any parliamentary or public debate or consultation, and completely contradicting concerns for safety and safeguarding from abuse.
This is no great surprise from Matt Hancock, who has form as a politician sympathetic to the abortion lobby. Not only, as Health Secretary, his previous changes to abortion regulation, but his Parliamentary record. This shows that whilst he was absent from most of the Commons votes on bioethical issues since he became an MP, he was one of the relatively few Tories to vote against an explicit ban on sex-selective abortion in 2015 and had previously voted against Nadine Dorries MP’s amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill in 2011, which would have mandated that women receive counselling on unplanned pregnancy from groups other than those with a material interest in providing abortions. Still, his actions were set and enabled by the wider strategy; the abortion lobby won.
At the same time, and in profound contrast to the choice by leading Commons opponent of abortion and retired nurse Maria Caulfield MP (Con; Lewes) to return to the NHS frontline to help during the corona crisis, Dame Diana Johnson MP decided to pressure the Government to make abortion more accessible to women in Northern Ireland, whilst the UK’s largest abortion provider BPAS has launched an illegal telemedical service to send abortifacients to women there, exploiting the absurd situation where a radically permissive abortion framework was imposed on that part of the UK by Westminster last year, but where no abortion ‘services’ have been commissioned. This will also help prepare the ground for quicker abortion access in the province.
We need not fault the abortion lobby merely for their opportunism in using the COVID-19 crisis for their own ends. This was entirely competent politics, and indeed is mirrored by the current attempts by campaigners in Poland to remove the ableist and discriminatory provision within Polish law that allows abortion in cases where “there is a high probability of a severe and irreversible fetal defect or incurable illness that threatens the fetus’s life”. Like so many such laws around the world, this is being abused in a materially eugenic manner, such as in cases where babies are detected as having Down’s syndrome. They are doing so now whilst mass protests (which, from a public relations perspective, helped de-rail the last attempt to remove unjust abortion exceptions in Polish law) are forbidden due to the COVID-19 lockdown. If this succeeds, it is to be applauded.
The point we should take from all this, however, is that unjust actions take place when the abortion lobby has the power and influence to make them happen. By the same token, justice can only be affected when Catholics, and others who oppose the cruelty of abortion, work to possess the same.
This is the key difference: for 50 years, the abortion lobby has worked to occupy the media and academic culture, as well as key positions in Royal Colleges, the BMA, the Department of Health, the Commons and Lords, the higher echelons of the political parties, and all the areas that influence medical practice and expertise. By contrast, the right-to-life movement has failed to make any such gains, concentrating on parliamentary tactics without laying the ground by which such efforts might be successful, and opening the door to quietly pro-abortion politicians like Hancock circumventing the Parliamentary process altogether.
In this light, we can see that the successes of the UK abortion lobby in the COVID-19 crisis are just symptoms of a wider problem. Thanks to our opponents’ ‘long march through the institutions’, the governing classes are dominated by a group-think set of ideologies that have deeply inhumane consequences.
This is true internationally, not just domestically, even if Britain is particularly egregious as the ‘geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death’. Last year, in a grotesquely perverse irony and despite significant arguments to the contrary, the U.N. Committee on the Right To Life actually defined access to “safe abortions” as part of the human right to life, due to the similar take-over of UN Committees by sub-humanist ideologues through Governments and NGOs.
Pope Francis alluded to the same hegemonic ideologies when in his recent interview with Austen Ivereigh, he referred to the “politics of the throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life”, in which “people are selected according to their utility or productivity”. The Holy Father cited the same phenomena of abusing pre-natal testing so that babies with Down’s syndrome are “binned” that the Poles are aiming to prevent, as well as the neo-Malthusian population control of the 20th century (sadly still with us).
As Catholics, beyond prayer and fasting for our country to come to repentance, we need to re-emphasise the ‘labora’ in the traditional phrase, ‘ora et labora’ (prayer and work). We can start by committing ourselves to organise ourselves and others in contacting our local MPs – and in Northern Ireland, MLAs, such as through the online utility here – to make the dangers of permissive regulations to pregnant women and their unborn children clear.
More broadly, however, we need to work intelligently to change our culture and society in the long term. The abortion lobby’s exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis has been enabled by the fact that Catholics and other Christians have allowed the governing classes and democratic institutions of our country to be infiltrated and dominated by those who are ideologically committed to the culture of death, and for whom legal and permissive abortion is a dark dogma of their perverse faith.
Unless we enter into the political parties, working to select and support good Parliamentary candidates, and work to become ourselves the leading figures in academic, medical, legal, and other leading institutions, we can never act successfully as salt and light in our culture. The alternative instead will be that we are condemned to look on at the side-lines as society becomes more and more dedicated to a culture that puts selfish pleasure ahead of duty and ruthless hedonism ahead of humanity to the most vulnerable. To avoid that fate, let us commit ourselves, each in their own way and in concert with like-minded others, to building a kingdom of just laws and true compassion for every member of the human family.