I was recently sent a link asking me to sign a petition calling for abortion to be outlawed except in some fairly restricted circumstances once a heartbeat is detected. I won’t be signing the petition or encouraging others to and I thought that it might be helpful to flesh out why, not least because abortion is something that I believe to be a bad and harmful thing both for the baby and the mum, something that I would like to live in a world without.
So why am I not in favour of this measure? Well first of all, the argument made for the petition is that we might need to take incremental steps which gradually make abortion rarer. a heartbeat is present at about 6 or 7 weeks. So, this isn’t an incremental step such as reducing the time limit to say 20 weeks. Furthermore, this means it is very close to conception, and it is at about the stage when a woman is first going to be aware that she might be pregnant. So, in effect, such a measure would mean that it would be too late for many for an abortion. In effect we have outlawed abortion except for some limited cases.
Now, it is worth observing at this stage, that the UK legal position for well over100 years has been that abortion has been illegal and criminalised. The 1967 Abortion Act neither legalised nor decriminalised the act. What it did was provide some specific exceptions, justifications if you like. It is true that a recent amendment to another bill passed through the House of Commons which would in effect decriminalise abortion for the mother, though not for others involved in an abortion. However, abortion still remains illegal at the moment, a criminal offense with exceptions.
Finally, changes to abortion law would need to be passed by devolved assemblies where this is within their jurisdiction. It’s not a simply matter of just getting it passed through Westminster and that means that even should changes be passed in one part of the United Kingdom they might not pass in all which increased the potential for confusion, a postcode lottery and women and girls travelling around the country for an abortion.
All in all, I’m not convinced by the strategy here, if it did get through in one parliament or assembly it would risk constitutional confusion with the further potential for legal challenges. It’s not likely to be voted through any of our parliaments or assemblies and it is likely to be seen as deceptive, whilst all the time it involves conceding ground on the principle.
Not only would I not sign the petition but I would advise other Christians and pro-lifers against signing it.
Faithroots 