IN the decades to come, when the history of our times is being written, one wonders how this government will come to be seen. It deserves to be known as ‘the Killing Parliament’ or something similar.
Such an epithet might surprise those MPs who last week voted to allow babies to be killed up to birth and for doctors to assist in the suicides of their patients.
One imagines they see themselves as rather nice. They are in a pitiable state of crisis because their moral sense has perhaps become so occluded by ideology that they have lost the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Their consciences are so numb that they don’t perceive they have done wrong. They are aware, however, that they must appear to be ‘nice’.
Hence the spectacles in Parliament in which the desire to do evil – to commit murder, no less, of the most vulnerable people in society – was presented in a raiment of white light. Thirst for blood was disguised by effusive pleasantries, impeccable manners, back-slapping shows of mutual appreciation, respect and gratitude stretching across the political divide.
Time and again MPs appealed to sentimentality as they sweetened the cases they made for killing the weak with enough sugar to keep the Tate & Lyle Thames Refinery busy for a year. Such performances were utterly superficial but invariably ‘nice’. Critics have said they were also hubristic. More accurately it could be argued that on display among politicians so manifestly pleased with themselves was perhaps not so much hubris but superbia, the deadliest form of pride and the sin by which the angels fall.
Amid such a mood, a hijacking amendment at Report Stage of the Crime and Policing Bill (https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3938) to decriminalise abortion up to and during birth passed easily by 379 votes to 137, a majority of 242, after Tonia Antoniazzi, the Labour MP for Gower, argued that it was cruel to jail women who used abortifacient drugs illegally to kill their unborn babies late in pregnancy.
In the most extreme case Sarah Catt was jailed for eight years in 2012 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9548293/Mother-who-aborted-baby-in-final-week-of-pregnancy-jailed-for-eight-years.html) after, just one week before she was due to give birth, she killed a son she conceived during a seven-year extramarital affair. Such cases were extremely rare until the Government introduced the ‘pills-by-post’ scheme to allow women to abort at home during the covid lockdown of 2020, and Parliament decided to retain it when all other emergency legislation was repealed. They remain rare but have increased in the last few years because of the scheme. Even so there have been only half a dozen police investigations, resulting in three prosecutions under the Offences Against the Persons Act 1861, the law by which abortion is illegal unless the criteria of the 1967 Abortion Act are met, including the 24-week upper time limit.
Ms Antoniazzi is the sort of feminist who believes there should be no prosecutions whatsoever because, in her view, it is not the killing of the baby but the jailing of the mother that is cruel, even saying in a radio interview that she is comfortable with women aborting at 37 weeks.
‘Let’s ensure that not a single desperate woman ever again is subject to traumatic criminal investigation at the worst moment in their lives,’ she said in a highly emotional plea to the Commons.
If only the sorority could have hijacked the Bill to spare responsible mothers from being jailed for imprudent tweets made in the heat of the moment, then deleted, following any massacre of schoolgirls. Many people see that as a cruel and disproportionate punishment which has left one mother desperate and traumatised. But that class of jailed woman elicits little sympathy among the Sisterhood sitting on the green benches of the Commons. Such women represent not even the merest of distractions, especially when a chance emerges to strip away more of the few remaining protections the law affords to unborn children. It is as if 253,000 annual abortions – the highest on record – is simply not enough for our political class.
The new clause does not supersede the provisions of the 1967 Act and the infrastructure which has been created to support access to legal abortion with medical oversight. This will remain the norm. What it does mean, however, is that any woman who wants to abort beyond the 24-week upper limit will not be prosecuted if, for any reason, she procures abortifacient drugs and performs the abortion herself.
Ironically, the clause effectively reintroduces the practice of backstreet abortions, the very mischief that David Steel’s Bill was supposed to address in 1967 because they caused an estimated 25 maternal deaths a year, but without punitive sanctions. To make this retrograde step possible, the 1861 Act will be amended to take abortion out of criminal law.
Catherine Robinson of the Right to Life charity said: ‘This law change would likely lead to the lives of many more women being endangered because of the risks involved with self-administered late-term abortions and also tragically lead to an increased number of viable babies’ lives being ended well beyond the 24-week abortion time limit and beyond the point at which they would be able to survive outside the womb.
‘The abortion lobby is pushing to decriminalise abortion to cover up the disastrous effects of its irresponsible pills-by-post scheme, which endangers women by removing the requirement for in-person consultations to reliably verify a woman’s gestational age and assess any health risks or the risk of coercion before abortion pills may be prescribed.’
She added: ‘The solution is clear. We urgently need to reinstate in-person appointments. This simple safeguard would prevent women’s lives from being put at risk from self-administered late-term abortions.’
It is unlikely that the Killing Parliament will do that. It is ideologically committed to the culture of death. It prefers the hedonistic mentalities of those who will not accept responsibility in matters of sexuality to people who do. It clearly shares a view of freedom as a right of absolute autonomy, a self-centred ideological aberration in which the duties to others that come with the exercise of true freedom are subservient to the quest for personal fulfilment.
What MPs revealed last week was the price they are willing to pay for such freedom. They have demonstrated that they do not believe unborn children have any right to life, even up to and during birth, when such children are obstacles to fulfilment. They therefore believe in the right of the strong to exercise dominion over the weak, and in ever-increasing circumstances to the point of killing them.
MPs might not yet have grasped the degree to which they have shocked the country, where polls suggest that only one per cent of women share their view that abortion up to birth should be permitted (UK polling on abortion), or much of the civilised world, given that the upper time limit for abortion in most European countries is 12 weeks. Their cruelty is a disgrace and a cause for shame. It isn’t nice. It’s barbaric.
