The UK Parliament has voted to decriminalise abortion up until birth in England and Wales. The amendment, which passed with 379 votes to 137, removes criminal penalties for women who undergo abortions at any stage, effectively allowing abortion on demand.
Under the 1967 Abortion Act, abortion was legal up to 24 weeks with approval from two doctors. Abortions after 24 weeks were allowed only in exceptional cases, such as to save the mother’s life or in cases of severe abnormalities. This amendment, part of the Criminal Justice Bill, removes criminal penalties for women who have abortions at any stage, although medical professionals may still face prosecution for performing abortions beyond the legal limits.
The amendment is still under review as part of the broader Criminal Justice Bill and must pass further stages in Parliament. If enacted, it would repeal sections 58 and 59 of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, aligning England and Wales with jurisdictions like Canada, while Northern Ireland decriminalised abortion in 2019 and Scotland is considering similar reforms.
This move further underscores the UK’s departure from its Christian foundation, shifting towards moral relativism where moral judgments—once grounded in the Bible—are now in the hands of degenerate politicians. This trend, infecting much of the Western world under the guise of pluralism and freedom from the moral restraints of the Christian religion, signals a terrifying shift: basic human rights, once believed to be granted by God and inalienable from any government, have now become the property of the state.
Consequently, a mere Parliamentary vote can now determine who has a right to life and who does not. While some may see this as progress toward freedom from government overreach, they have unwittingly handed the state absolute control over human life. By legalising abortion, we are not just allowing the state to regulate life and death; we are redefining rights as privileges that can be granted and revoked by government, not as inherent gifts from God.
In their vain pursuit of “bodily autonomy,” pro-abortion advocates have ironically surrendered their entire bodily integrity to the state. What prevented women from playing God with the lives of their babies was the same God-given right to life that stopped the state from playing God with theirs. If the government can rule that some lives are not worth protecting, what’s to stop it from extending that judgment to any other group in society? Those who sought the “right to choose” have forfeited their very “right to life” in the process.
In the end, for a government to decriminalise abortion, it first requires the surrender of the fundamental right to life itself. If the state is to legalise the killing of some human beings, inherent God-given rights must be redefined as state-sanctioned privileges that can be granted or revoked with the arbitrary passing of a bill. So, congratulations! You might have removed your child’s bodily autonomy, but it also came at the cost of your own. You now live by the mercy of the state.
