Category Archives: Abortion

Abortion: a quest for principles

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Summarising an article by Donald MacLeod in The Monthly Record; March, 1979

11,000 terminations in Britain per month.  [N.B. this figure has increased, as of 2024, to around 16,500]

‘Many Christians have never looked at the problem in the light of moral and theo­logical considerations and provably accept prevailing attitudes without thinking.’

A woman’s right to control her fertility

‘The slogan of those who advocate a liberal attitude to abortion is that women have the right to control their own fertility.…

Abortion: what does the Bible teach?

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Richard Hays points out that the Bible contains no texts about abortion.  Those texts which are claimed to be pertinent to the question (Ex 20:13; Deut 5:17; Ex 21:22-25; Psa 139:13-16; Lk 1:44; Gal 5:20 and Mt 19:14) are more or less irrelevant.

However, a broader survey on the biblical material relating to pregnancy and childbearing would yield the following conclusion:

‘Children are a great blessing from God, and childlessness a terrible affliction. Children are seen as a guarantee of posterity and as a source of economic blessing and security.’
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A chilling appointment

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It seems that most people (apart from his admirers and appointees) think that Donald Trump’s recent behaviour is absurd.  Delusional, even.  Everyone else can see that he has lost the Presidential election fair and square.  Just calling an election ‘fake’ and ‘corrupt’ doesn’t make it so.

But, in popular thinking, for every villain there must be a good guy.  So, step up, Joe Biden.  You have handled yourself with dignity and restraint, and have been quietly getting on with appointing new people for the new administration.…

Abortion used to be a feminist issue

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David Baker writes:

Once, abortion was a feminist issue. Alice Paul (1885-1977) denounced abortion as an evil forced upon women by men. A number of suffragists called abortion “child murder” in Susan B. Anthony’s publication, The Revolution. There are those who still bravely bear that flame today, with Feminists for Life of America, being one such organisation. Feminists for Life of America first revealed and shared many pro-life quotes from the first wave feminists and on its website you can read ‘pro-woman answers to pro-choice questions’…

Let the last words be given to feminist writer and bioethicist Fiorella Nash. …

Another silent killer

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Just a few days ago – 1st April 2020 – the number of deaths associated with the coronavirus rose by 563 in a single day.

This is similar to the number of abortions that are carried out in the UK every day of every year.

The first of these situations is regarded as an ’emergency’.  Everyone’s talking about it.  Everyone is affected by it.

The second scarcely raises an eyebrow.  However an abortion may affect those directly involved (the mother and the father, especially), for the rest of us, it’s ‘business as usual’.…

The unborn baby is a person

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John Stott:

‘The author of Psalm 139 looks back to the antenatal stage of his existence. Three words sum up what he affirms. First, creation. He seems to liken God both to a potter who “formed” his inmost being and to a weaver who “knit him together” in his mother’s womb (v. 13). Although the Bible makes no claim to be a textbook of embryology, here is a plain affirmation that the growth of the fetus is neither haphazard nor automatic but a divine work of creative skill.…

A world without Down’s Syndrome?

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In England and Wales between 1989 and 2012 almost 20,000 babies were diagnosed pre-natally with Down’s Syndrome.  Of these, 92% were aborted.

Recently, the UK government has decided to roll out a new pre-natal test (NIPT test) for Down’s Syndrome.  It is thought to be 98% accurate.  It is likely to lead to over 100 Down’s Syndrome babies being identified each year, with the expectation that most of these, too, will be aborted.

In a TV programme this autumn, actress Sally Phillips (mother of an 11-year-old son, Olly, who has Down’s Syndrome), asked, ‘What’s so dreadful about Down’s Syndrome?’  …

Protecting the unborn child

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John Stott is his usual measured self when he speaks and writes on the subject of abortion.  So it is without hyperbole that he urges us to avoid euphemisms, and to speak of things as they really are:-

‘The popular euphemisms make it easier for us to conceal the truth from ourselves. The occupant of the mother’s womb is not a ‘product of conception’ or ‘gametic material’, but an unborn child. Even ‘pregnancy’ tells us not more than that a woman has been ‘impregnated’, whereas the truth in old-fashioned language is that she is ‘with child’.
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