Andrea Williams discusses devastating abortion stats and encourages the Church to respond faithfully and boldly to these increasing attacks on human life in the UK.
A new analysis of abortion figures has revealed the devastating reality that 40.3% of pregnancies in the Labour-majority cities of Liverpool and Brighton and Hove end in abortion.
This analysis also shows abortion rates are highest in Labour strongholds, while the more politically conservative areas generally correspond with having lower abortion rates.
This is not to say that the Conservatives have been significantly better at protecting life and biblical values over the last few years either.
But the reality is that Labour has time and again spearheaded recent attempts to devalue human life and promote abortion as a human right.
So, is it really any surprise that the most morally liberal Left-leaning cities are leading the charge with abortions?
Abortions skyrocket as births in crisis
Between 2021 and 2022, abortions skyrocketed 17.3% from 214,869 to 252,122. This is the “highest year-on-year leap in the number of abortions in 50 years since decriminalisation began.”
At Christian Concern, we warned this would happen with the legalisation of the ‘pills by post’ scheme implemented during Covid. We brought a judicial review to resist this DIY abortion law, and exposed the dangers of Parliament’s decision to make the law change permanent after the Covid lockdowns.
However, DIY abortion has been sadly entrenched in our society, and this tragic leap in abortions is the result.
We must not allow ourselves to become desensitised to the reality that each one of these digits is a human life lost.
At the same time, despite the percentage of women in England and Wales having increased by almost 4 million over these 20 years, the number of births in 2022 was at the lowest since 2002, with only 607,900 recorded.
In addition, abortions now end over a 3rd (36%) of all pregnancies for women over the age of 40.
These statistics are heart-breaking, as they should be.
They reveal the lostness of our culture; that we are willing to allow these innocent lives to be taken and these women to be deceived into thinking they have the right to take the lives of their own children.
We have forgotten the value of life, the importance of family, and the beauty of bringing children into this world.
A silent crisis
However, except for the unborn, those perhaps paying the highest price for the deceptive ideology of abortion is the rising generation. We owe them more.
Over 50% of all teen pregnancies now end in abortion, and almost half of 20 to 24-year-olds make the same choice.
These statistics reveal a silent crisis among our young people.
A whole generation is growing up unable to see the humanity of the children they are carrying.
They have been lied to by a culture and by laws that say their unborn children are merely ‘clumps of cells’ and not priceless human lives.
That is not just their fault. It is also ours.
We have allowed the creation of a culture that is unaware of the truth about pregnancy and the reality that there are always two lives involved.
We have dehumanised life in the womb to the detriment of what it means to be a woman and a mother and to the detriment of society.
When a woman takes the life of her child, it is counter intuitive. No wonder she feels intensely confused, bewildered, sad, alone, and depressed.
Wasn’t abortion meant to be female empowerment?
We are not empowering young people; we are abandoning them to a culture that has lost its moral compass.
And then we leave them in their turmoil of confused emotions without giving them the tools and information to know why they feel this way.
This is one of the tragic results of abortion ideology: that hurting women who feel post-abortive regret and depression are told there is no reason for them to grieve the loss of their child because their baby was not a human life anyway.
They deserved the truth before their abortion, and they deserve the truth about why they are grieving after the loss of their baby.
Labour-led laws dismantling biblical value of life and family
Each party has its problems – that is the reality of politics in a secular nation.
However, after Labour’s landslide win in the general elections, the charge against life has only accelerated and is becoming yet more deadly in a majority Labour chamber.
Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi put forward the amendment aiming to decriminalise abortion up to birth.
Stella Creasy, long term political abortion activist and Labour MP, proposed another amendment which would have enshrined abortion as a human right. By the grace of God, this amendment did not go to a vote.
And the assisted suicide bill, spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, was narrowly voted through at Third Reading in the House of Commons.
One thing is clear – under the influence of Left-leaning policies, Labour strongholds have become deadly places for the unborn and the vulnerable.
However, the erosion of the legal right to life, the destruction of the family, and the abandonment of God’s teaching is not merely a Labour problem or a party-political problem. It is a sin problem.
This rejection of the value of life is an inevitable reality in a nation that has pursued secularism and discarded the biblical moral foundations that it was built upon.
The Left is merely revealing our nation’s state of heart, and only Jesus can provide the life-giving solution to the UK’s headlong pursuit of self-destruction.
The Church must not stay silent
After our nation turned its back on God’s law, we are witnessing the consequences in major cities where unborn babies have a 40% likelihood of not drawing their first breath in life.
We will continue to boldly show the results of these legal attacks on the value of life. We will continue to hold our politicians to account and to campaign for life.
And we will continue to bring Jesus Christ and his truth to the heart of our nation.
But we cannot do it alone.
This is a matter of life and death for future generations, and a matter of long overdue post-mortem justice for the millions of unborn lives already lost in the UK.
The Church needs to reclaim her voice and her position of being a beacon of hope, truth, and baby rescue in a broken world.
And in bringing Jesus to the heart of society, we will create a pro-life culture that will spring up from our churches and from our young people, forming a holy revival that saves lives, families, communities and our nation.
Jesus is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), he is the life giver, and he is what our nation needs most desperately.
His promise to all the broken, lost people in our country – to all the men, women and children who have been blinded to the value of life and the redemption found in the gospel – is that He will give them life: that they “will know the truth” and that the truth – Jesus Christ – “will set [them] free”.
Find out more about DIY abortions
