Killing babies is fine now?

In the Fallow Field

I went down on my hands and knees
Looking for trees,
Twin leaves that, sprung from seeds,
Were now too big
For stems much thinner than a twig.
These soon with chamomile and clover
And other fallow weeds
Would be turned over;
And I was thinking how
It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

- Andrew Young

* * * * *

I nearly died before I lived. I was born (in the early hours of the morning) with the umbilical cord caught round my neck, and the midwife went into a massive panic.

It got untangled in the end, but I was pretty close to never knowing what Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being here”.

No wedding day ceilidh. No first kiss. No seventh birthday fireworks. Never smelling newly cut grass, or fresh bread, or roasting coffee.

We are all lucky to have caught the bus to ever existing.

For some it’s a close-run thing. Our son (6) is the fruit of our eighth and was-always-going-to-be final round of IVF. When we did the pregnancy test, it was negative. We were heartbroken. But looking at it a little later (which you should never do) it showed a faint line. A tiny ribbon of hope in the wind.

We tested again the next day. A faint, just visible line. He caught the bus.

He sometimes drives us crazy, but this morning he was attacking me in the kitchen with a soft dinosaur, and he was happy because the tooth fairy brought him a pound, and I am so glad he is with us.

Say you were to ask me this very strange question: when did you try hardest not to drop something? I could answer easily.

After our daughter was born - after incredible endurance from my wife - our little daughter was cleaned up by the doctors, then given to me to carry back across the room, to snuffle on her mother’s breast. My first responsibility as a father.

I have never been so careful not to drop something.

She was only really a couple of handfuls then, but already wholly perfect.

* * * * *

Last night the House of Lords voted for an amendment which will decriminalise self-induced abortions all the way up the point of birth. So you will be able to kill a baby the day before it is about to be born, and face no legal consequences.

This is monstrous.

There is no magic that happens as you pass down the birth canal. There is no flash of light as your soul descends. There is no moral difference whatsoever between a baby the day before birth, and a baby a day after.

The thought that someone could poison or smash up the body of a baby and face no legal consequences is appalling. That’s an overused word these days so let me try again. The thought should make you sick.

Advocates for this appalling change play silly word games, but if the law banning late abortions is no longer enforced, it effectively won’t exist.

And everyone knows what is coming next. This amendment will result in horrific amateur home abortions. Some will be forced on women by men. But either way it will be horrific. And then the same people who advocated for this will then say we should “tidy up” the mess they made and allow the same things to happen in clinical settings too.

This is not even being done as a stand-alone new law, but as an amendment tacked on to the Crime and Policing Bill which the government originally said is intended to “protect the public and our town centres from antisocial behaviour, retail crime and shop theft”.

There have been no impact assessments, no public consultation, and almost no public debate. Polling shows people are overwhelmingly against abortion up to the day of birth. There were just 45 minutes of backbench debate on it in the Commons. But the law will be changed anyway.

The people pushing this - like Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Tonia Antoniazzi, are perfectly clear about where they stand. All conversations end in thought-terminating slogans, like: “my body my choice”. But this is nonsense. Yes, it is your body, but it also someone else’s body too. What about their rights?

Antoniazzi is at least perfectly clear. Times Radio host, Stig Abell asked her: “Any woman could end a pregnancy at any time, 35 weeks, 36 weeks, 37 weeks, without committing an offence. And you are comfortable with that?” Tonia replied: “Yes I am.”

Now, up to a point these things are debatable. When do you become a person? At the moment of conception? Or when you begin to think and feel, mid-way through pregnancy? Until last night the law had settled, uneasily, on the latter. But no one was pretending that full term babies were not people with rights. Until now.

One irony is that the government originally said that the Crime and Policing Bill would also “tackle the epidemic of… violence against women and girls that stains our society”.

Violence against girls? Now you can kill a baby girl and face no consequence. Perhaps your husband doesn’t want a girl. Unlucky her to have been dealt the wrong chromosome. The reason you kill the baby doesn’t matter, there will be no penalty.

Would this happen? It already is doing. The NHS says that there is clear evidence that sex-selective abortions are happening already in some communities.

None of this is abstract. In 2012 Sarah Catt was jailed for killing a baby at 39 weeks. The court said she took a “cold, calculated” decision for her own convenience and self-interest. She took pills at 39 weeks and gave birth, and never revealed where the body was. The court said she had a history of deceit and concealment. The judge said she did it because she thought the man with whom she was having an affair was the father.

From now on, that will be absolutely fine. There will be no prosecution for doing this.

* * * * * *

Most bad things happen not because people are like: “yay, let’s do something terrible”, but because we do what human beings are best at - we look the other way.

From the holocaust to the mass inhumane treatment of animals, people look the other way.

I am no exception. I wonder how much of the meat I have eaten in my life was raised in conditions of grotesque cruelty? I have never marched to stop the war, although several of our recent wars have brought nothing but utter disaster. And I have generally tried to stay out of the abortion debate. I would rather not think about it.

But this is now ridiculous. Murdering people is bad, and there is no debate that these babies who can now be killed are people, just like you and me.

Am I not a man and a brother? I am not a religious person, but I do think killing babies is bad.

Never mind the fact that they can think and feel. They can live. These days three in ten babies born at 22 weeks will survive. By 26 weeks it is 80 percent - and rising.

* * * * *

While they were at it last night, the Lords also voted to keep abortion pills-by-post, and rejected plans to return to requiring a medical assessment to prevent coercion.

We already know that this is being abused by bad men. In December 2024, Stuart Worby was jailed after spiking a woman’s drink and ending the life of her unborn child at 15 weeks gestation using abortion pills obtained through the pills-by-post scheme.

We also know pills-by-post is causing real problems. A FOI request in 2022 to six ambulance services found a 64% increase in ambulance call-outs from women concerned after taking abortion pills. A study found that 10,000 women, or 1 in 17, of those who took abortion pills at home prescribed by the NHS, required hospital treatment in 2020.

* * * * *

In January new data showed that the number of abortions in England and Wales had risen to a record high in 2023 - a 10% increase on the previous year. That brought the total to just under 300,000 a year across the UK - equivalent to the population of a city the size of Leicester every year.

Number of abortions, residents of England and Wales, 1969 to 2023

Someone said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and as rare as possible”, but it is no longer rare. We are close to one abortion for every two births.

I have written before about offering more support to people who want to have children. But it isn’t the number of people that conceive that has gone down. Compared to 1968 we have a quarter fewer births, but actually more conceptions. Abortion makes up the difference.

When I look at the charts above, I think of the lines from Andrew Young that I quoted at the top.

It was a pity someone should not know
That a great forest fell before the plough.

300,000 people a year never get to be born. More than ten million lives have been ended this way since 1967.

They could have lived, but will never get to see the sun rise, never taste ice-cream and never feel a hug.

Left alone they would have mainly grown and lived. But they had no voice, and we took that all away from them.

The clinching argument in the 1960s for the legalisation of abortion was to avoid “back street” and home abortions.

But now the advocates of further liberalisation are backing DIY abortions in order to push on with their agenda: pills by post with no checks, and no prosecution for late abortions as long as you do it yourself and no clinician is involved.

This will lead to disasters and then the advocates of it will come back for more.

I voted against these changes and will vote to repeal them if I get a chance.

I don’t have many original thoughts to add to this long-running and emotive debate.

But one thing I think is missing is this.

There are loads of people who would like to adopt a baby. Particularly among those who cannot have children - which is a growing group as we all delay having kids.

The number of people who would adopt a baby is larger than those who would adopt or foster grown children. The people who take on bigger children are heroes and deserve medals.

But there are many people who don’t feel able to do this, but are longing for children and would adopt a baby. Meanwhile there are women who are pregnant and don’t feel they can bring up a child.

There must be a way to solve one problem with the other? To offer people the support they need to have a baby and a home for him or her to live in and be loved in? Shouldn’t people be given that choice and offered the help to make it?

People say that every child should be a wanted child, but there are many people who want and don’t have. My former colleague Michael Gove recalls how his adoptive mother told him: “You didn't grow under my heart, you grew in it”.

I know quite a few people who had the same love from an adoptive parent.

I think we have massively lost our way here. There are lots of things that are complicated, but killing babies is wrong.

There are lots of people who were on the road to life, but will never get to live. But they have no voice and we - including me - don’t like to think about it. So we look the other way.

That’s got to change.