Speaking in Clitheroe, Lancashire, at the Bank Holiday Monday Right to Life Whit Walk, David (Lord) Alton reminded walkers that St. Teresa of Calcutta had said that in the struggle to safeguard the sanctity of human life: “we are not called upon to be successful but faithful.”

Reflecting on the Irish referendum result, Lord Alton said that the sponsored walk through Lancashire’s Ribble Valley, to raise funds for the Right to Life charity, was “a chance to both witness and to express solidarity with the three quarters of a million Irish people who had voted against removing protection for the unborn child from the Irish Constitution.” He said: “[Irish pro-lifers] campaigned under the slogans that ‘both lives matter’ and that ‘we must always love both’ – mother and child –this should remain the clarion call of the pro-life movement.” 

Lord Alton also said that: “no one ever said this would be an easy fight paved with victories but every life saved, every mind changed, is how we must measure success.”

Lord Alton, whose late mother was a native Irish speaker has, along with his children, Irish as well as British Citizenship. Speaking on the Irish Referendum’s landslide result in favour of introducing abortion to the Republic of Ireland, he said that anyone who loved Ireland and its people would “feel dispirited and distressed by this outcome.Every abortion is a tragedy. With one abortion in England, every three minutes, Ireland will come to regret following the British law – a law that allows abortion up to and even during birth in the case of disability – leading to the death of 90 percent of babies with Downs Syndrome.”

Of the street celebrations in Dublin and elsewhere by Irish pro-abortionists, Lord Alton said: “It was bordering on the obscene to watch people celebrating an event that will lead to the ending of innocent life. The spectacle of crowds gathering in castle Yard in Dublin, where mobs once gathered to cheer the public execution of prisoners, was distasteful in the extreme.”  

Turning to the threat posed by the referendum outcome to Northern Ireland’s current restrictions on abortion, Lord Alton said: “It is beyond belief that liberals, who say they believe in devolution, quickly abandon their belief in devolution when it comes to abortion. They gather in the restaurants of Richmond Upon Thames or the Islington wine bars and plot to impose their political ideology and agenda on the people of Northern Ireland – where 100,000 people are alive today, 5 percent of the population, precisely because Northern Ireland refused to introduce British abortion laws. This is a matter to be settled in the North by the North and not by Westminster.”

Lord Alton said that: “time and again those in favour of abortion, embryo experimentation, coercive overseas abortions, and euthanasia have relentlessly campaigned to change laws that since Hippocrates crafted the Hippocratic Oath – with explicit condemnation of abortion and euthanasia -have served society well. There is no such thing as a safe abortion for the baby in the womb.”

Lord Alton concluded by saying that: “In Britain and now Ireland this is the most dangerous time in history to be an unborn child. For now we weep and stand with Rachel but, as the baton passes to the next generation, we will redouble our efforts until we change hearts, minds, attitudes, culture and laws.”