Abortion Politics Hang Heavy Over Upcoming UK General Election

Vote for the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats and abortion’s bloodied floodgates will open ever wider. Voting Conservative and you are supporting a party that seems intent on funding abortion abroad.

(photo: Mazur/cbcew.org.uk)

The United Kingdom’s General Election is entering its last lap.

On Dec. 12, 2019, British voters will go to the polls to elect a new government.

This election has been dubbed — correctly — as the “Brexit Election.” Brexit is the still-pending U.K. exit from the European Union following the result of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s continued membership of that trading and political bloc. However, as is the norm in general elections, political parties still have to go through the motions of having other policies with a manifesto launch detailing those polices other than Brexit.

Currently, the mainstream British political landscape is made up of the center-right Conservative Party, the center-left Labour Party, and the centrist Liberal Democrats. Or that is how it was until recently. This time around, we have a Tory party under Boris Johnson moved to the right by Brexit; a Labour party shifted radically to the Left by its leader, Jeremy Corbyn; and a Liberal Democrat Party that appears to be more illiberal and undemocratic with each of its pronouncements — especially those on the subject of Brexit.

The LibDems want simply to cancel Brexit — the referendum never happened; forget it; the 17-plus million that voted for and won the referendum were not only wrong in their vote but delusional in thinking that the referendum occurred in the first place. The Labour Party does not so much want to cancel the 2016 referendum as re-run it. As if there had not been enough time wasted on the issue in the last three and half years, it wants to hold another referendum. The rationale for this course of action is wrapped around a party slogan about wanting to reunite the country. The 2016 referendum, however, tore the U.K. asunder and there is little sign that another “people’s vote” would restore any sense of unity soon. As for the Tories, they are as divided on Brexit as the rest of the country. Some are for the deal brought back recently by Prime Minister Johnson, some think it is “not Brexit enough,” while others again are for remaining in the European Union.

The fact that this is an election dominated by a single issue does not mean that in the depths of the various manifestos there is nothing noteworthy — and, as it turns out, sinister.

When you thought that the U.K. may have had had enough of abortion — with abortions currently running at well over 200,000 per year, or roughly 600 per day — and with one of the most liberal regimes in Europe, we have two parties (Labour and LibDems) calling for an even greater liberalization of the current abortion law, right up to birth.

In fact, what both parties advocate is a complete decriminalization of abortion. This also means a complete deregulation of abortion provision. Earlier this year, by Parliamentary sleight of hand, abortion was decriminalized in Northern Ireland. What critics of that legal reform have pointed out is that to decriminalize abortion is one thing, but the legal and medical vacuum left by such an abrupt change in legislation means no regulation of abortion of any sort is in place, for anyone involved, least of all for the unborn.

In both the LibDems and the Labour Parties any pro-life voices have long since been sidelined or silenced. In addition, in the party’s election manifesto, the LibDems have pledged to introduce “censorship zones” around abortion facilities to make it a crime to offer support to women outside such places. By so doing, the LibDems want to effect in wider society what they have achieved long ago within the party — namely, an end to any debate on abortion.

But before you cheer too loudly for the Tories, it would be best to take a closer look at some of that party’s links to the abortion industry.

Since the Conservatives took power in 2010 — albeit, until 2015, in coalition with the LibDems — the Department for International Development (DfID) increased its contributions to the abortion giant Marie Stopes International (MSI) to £48,173,000 ($62,151,124) in 2018. Financial statements for the MSI found in Companies House reveal that since 2010 DfID has given almost £300 million ($387,049,538) worth of taxpayers’ money to MSI, with over three-quarters of that total given between 2014 and 2018, making DfID the single biggest donor to MSI. In 2018 DfID’s contributions accounted for 16% of MSI’s entire income totaling £296,849,000 ($382,895,226).

In comparison, at the height of its contributions, in 2016 the United States government donated almost £24 million ($30,956,767) to MSI, which is just over half the total contributions of the British Government for that same year.

All this money from both governments funded the approximately 5 million abortions MSI performed globally.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, just a few weeks ago in September, a Boris Johnson led Government provided an additional £600 million ($773,909,030) of taxpayer money for overseas “family planning,” which will include funding abortions. The pledge is the U.K. Government’s largest ever stand-alone spend of taxpayers’ money in this area and comes on top of the £1.1 billion ($1.8 billion) already pledged over a 5 year period beginning in 2017.

So there you have it.

Vote for the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats and abortion’s bloodied floodgates will open ever wider across this increasingly disunited Kingdom; while voting Conservative, you are supporting a party that seems intent on funding abortion abroad — no matter what the cost.

Elections are all about choice. In the case of the British 2019 General Election, however, at times it seems to be more about “pro-choice.”

At the polling booth this election, held on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, never before has the pen used to mark the ballot paper felt more like a scalpel.