On Tuesday June 17th 2025, the British Parliament (the ‘Mother of Parliaments’) voted after a short debate to decriminalise abortion up to birth when carried out by the pregnant woman herself, thereby shrugging through something which is claimed to be ‘widely popular’ but was not in Labour’s manifesto.
The sentiment is almost a cliché at this point, but I get the feeling that when future scholars are describing the fall of the West, this will be a feature. To my mind, it’s a tragic and profoundly evil development and I’ll explain why in this article, but, if you’re on the other side, it is the argument’s logical conclusion. If abortion has no moral quality to it because a foetus is not a living thing at 23 weeks and six days following conception (the legal limit for abortions to be performed by the NHS in the UK) then there is no moral reason to say that an abortion performed after this arbitrary cut off should have any implications either. The strongest arguments I have heard relate to premature birth survival rates, but an otherwise healthy unborn foetus growing in the womb doesn’t need to survive outside; it’s where it needs to be. There are, of course, many other arguments made in favour of abortion, but cleverer people than me have addressed them before now; Lois McLatchie Miller, Calvin Robinson and the Revd Dr Jamie Franklin to name just three. Nor will I provide detail of how abortions are completed and the pain inflicted on the foetus at different times of gestation; it’s described in other sources, and it’s horrific.
I grew up in an education system which taught us that abortion was effectively a final birth control, ready and waiting for when you forgot to use all the others which might come before – it was treated with indifference. I was a sceptical teenager generally, but I internalised this message without question. In fact, I internalised it without realising it was a message at all, and that it had arguments both for and against.
I was part of a tight-knit group of friends at school and into my early 20s, all of us reprobates, and some of us periodically in relationships with each other. When I was 18, two of my friends conceived a child together. The father, who was besotted with the mother, was quietly pleased. The mother was not. Being one of the few of us who could drive, I was asked to take her to the hospital and sit with her whilst an abortion was carried out. To my everlasting shame and regret, I played my part and I did it with indifference, just as I’d been taught. When, some time later, she thanked me for not making a fuss and quietly looking after her that day, I was genuinely perplexed – we hadn’t done anything of note, had we? If we had, the nurse might have discussed options or suggested we talked to parents. Aftercare might have been offered. But then, why do people mourn the loss of an unborn baby? If what we’d done had a moral implication then we had clearly chosen the immoral option, so that can’t be right. It cannot be simultaneously a medical procedure akin to having a mole removed and also something which warranted a heartfelt and profound emotional outpouring afterward. To my further regret, I could only think to shrug and say it was nothing. I’m still close with the father today, and, all these years later, we’ve never discussed it.
That little boy or girl would now be 14.
With numbers of abortions performed in the UK rising steadily from 185,000 per year in 2016 and heading towards 220,000 today, I seriously doubt I am alone in looking back on my experience with regret. Free speech around this issue is, to my mind, almost non-existent to any practical extent. If I were to tell my story and explain my view to my MP it would most likely be met with indifference, or possibly contempt (he is Labour, after all). If I were to tell it to an expectant mother considering an abortion (i.e., someone who really should hear a view from the other side) arrest seems like a distinct possibility.
I think members of the public who supported lockdowns partly did so for so long, and so vehemently, because to change one’s mind would require admitting to cheering on policies which were cruel, destructive and unnecessary. I was never a vocal or passionate supporter of a woman’s ‘right to choose’, I was just one of the many who took it as read that abortion was a simple medical procedure with no moral implications. Changing my mind was, and is, painful and it would be so much more difficult if I’d lost my own child to it.
The logical conclusion of the Left’s argument has been realised. The logical conclusion of mine is that abortion is immoral in all circumstances and should be illegal. I don’t say this with any malice or glee to those who disagree; I say it with compassion.
Perversely, with the line now so stark and so binary, mine seems a simpler argument to make. I hope more people will make it.
Oscar Evans is the pseudonym of an arborist who helps landowners to manage urban tree stocks.
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Interestingly the moniker” my body my choice” was quietly abandoned when under COVID others realized they could spin that argument too.
And ironically it was under Biden’s presidency that Roe vs Wade was overturned.
You couldn’t make this up.
I think its easy to fall in with the ‘my body my choice’ and support that totally, but as Bill Burr once remarked, ‘I support it, but this is where is gets weird, because I think you’re killing a baby.’
I think its the numbers that are really staggering, 200,000 a year is more than ‘last resort birth control’. It speaks of people who do not take their responsibilities seriously and instead treat human procreation as a frivolity and fundamentally worthless.
That’s quite a xhilking thought, the idea that trying to change a pregnant woman’s mind about getting an abortion may get you arrested.
”The logical conclusion of mine is that abortion is immoral in all circumstances and should be illegal.”
That’s your opinion, to which you are entitled, but what an utterly nonsensical and impractical thing to say. I am a realist and I’ve never looked at topics such as this through a rigid, ‘black and white’ lens. I’m also not one of these sanctimonious and hypocritical people who feels the need to judge others and look down on them at every available opportunity, because I don’t think myself morally superior to anyone. We are all fallible and we all make mistakes. Every individual has their own personal story and different set of circumstances which need to be taken into account.
Even if a country were so backwards as to make abortion illegal it would be just like going back in time, where girls/women were seeking to terminate pregnancies via a ‘back street abortionist’ or try some highly dangerous ‘D.I.Y’ method at home. Or they could just go abroad, such as the Irish or Poles used to do. You will never ever get rid of abortion, whether legal or otherwise. I’d much rather a female have access to a safe facility to go through with this procedure, not having to worry about risking her life or doing irreparable damage to her body.
To make my stance on this subject clear, once again: I would like to see the upper limit for abortion lowered to at least 12 weeks, but also, once could be put down to a mistake, but women who repeatedly go for abortions ( hopefully such people are few and far between ), as opposed to just find a reliable and suitable form of contraceptive ( out of the myriad forms that are available ) are absolutely veering into ‘psychological problems’ territory, in my opinion.
When we compare the experience of having an abortion ( and these vary a great deal ) with popping a pill, having an implant inserted under the skin or getting the Depo-Provera injection, the contrast is like night and day. Any female seeing abortion as anything other than a one-off last resort, or viewing it as a form of birth control ( bear in mind you can easily get the ‘morning after’ pill also ) really do need their heads read.
It would be remiss of me to not mention that boys/men need to step up and take some responsibility here too, because condoms are now so widely available and cheap that there really is no excuse. It’s very lame and unfair indeed to put all of the responsibility on the female partner, especially as wearing a condom comes with no potential side effects ( unlike birth control ), protects against STIs, and doesn’t it take two to get a woman pregnant in the first place? No excuses at all for the men.
“Or they could just go abroad, such as the Irish or Poles used to do.”
Some of us went abroad to get vaccination certificates without having to face the risk of an experimental poison. Somehow the same people who praise women going abroad for abortions feel they ought to criminalize those going abroad for other services.
Either there is choice or there isn’t.
It’s not necessarily a question of judging others or making mistakes. If you believe that a foetus is a sacred life then you are obliged to oppose abortion. I’m not sure arguing that it would happen anyway makes much sense – I mean, murder happens anyway, but we still make it illegal. I am conflicted on the subject, but I do think the arguments against abortion are coherent.
Murder happens anyway, as does shoplifting, tax evasion, drug usage, people ignoring speed limits, you name it. There is a difference between what is morally right and what is realistically enforceable. The eyes of the law cannot be everywhere, and we don’t actually want them to be everywhere.
People should do the right thing because they believe it is right, not because they fear the law. If you want a more moral society you have to encourage people to be more moral. Then you can relax the control side. And one consequence of this is that there may then be back doors for people in special situations to carefully consider the consequences and then do things that would not normally be acceptable.
Sorry I am not sure what argument you are making. Are you saying we should not have laws at all?
I think most people would recognise significant differences between the wrongness of murder and the wrongness of drug use or ignoring speed limits – that is why we have different punishments for them.
I am saying there should be a shift towards more morality and less policing. Back where we were in the past when we accepted that the authority of the police, and by extension of the law itself, was rooted in public consent. This is not the same as abolishing all laws.
It might appear to be old fashioned common sense that “most people would recognise significant differences between the wrongness of murder and the wrongness of drug use or ignoring speed limits”, but we now live in a time where people are thrown into prison for many years for tweeting the wrong opinion whereas murderers are allowed to walk. I would say this is a result of too much faith in mechanistic laws and not enough common sense.
Well I would generally agree but if you believe abortion is basically murder then you would probably want it to be illegal.
“People should do the right thing because they believe it is right, not because they fear the law.”
Funnily enough this is almost verbatim the end of the Book of Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own sight.”
By the way, it’s not a pleasant read.
This particular argument doesn’t make any sense because it has abortion is legitimate as implied premise. If we assume that, it obviously makes sense to provide a woman seeking to terminate a pregnancy with way to do so safely or as safe as it can be made to be. If, however, the starting position were that a woman seeking to terminate pregnancy is really planning to murder another human being for her own convenience, there’s no reason why she should have option to do so at no cost and without risk to herself. That the procedure is costly and dangerous would then serve as an additional deterrent which would prevent at least some of the planned murders.
You are quite right about boys/men needing to step up. Pre 1960s if the man got a woman pregnant he would have to marry her (and stay married to her, no easy divorce in those days) – the onus was on him to take preventative measures and should still be in the forefront of every man’s mind IMO.
This point gets deliberately overlooked and ignored. I know this for a fact because no men ever call out other men, they’re all too busy condemning the women or looking the other way while others do, thereby demonstrating their silent agreement and support.
An example of the general consensus of the DS Boys Club is as follows;
A woman decides to not have children = condemned.
A woman has a child then returns to work after maternity leave = condemned.
A woman becomes a single parent, for whatever reason = looked down on, labelled a “slapper” or “sponger” and condemned.
A woman decides to have an abortion, for whatever reason = condemned.
Then there’s the scenario where a woman has an unplanned pregnancy, she wants to keep it, he doesn’t, and so he ( and possibly his family ) accuse her of attempting to trap him.
So you see, women cannot win when it comes to the misogynists and their flying monkeys ( you know who you are, ladies.😏 ) They’ll continue to resent/hate/scapegoat us whichever path we decide on taking in our lives. It’s pathological.
The problem with this is that the male person involved here can chose to step away from the outcome while the woman can’t. This means the woman has to take responsibility because she’ll be the one who’ll otherwise be saddled with the problem and idly arguing about how things should be is not going the change this.
Eg, a well-known phenomenon in rural East Prussia in the early 20th century was that young women would move to some town to find employment there, usually as some kind of house servant, and would then be forced to move back to their families once someone, probably more often than not either her employer or one of his sons, had gotten her pregnant.
Abortion is the murder of a human being. 200k a year is 1 million every 5 years. Shocking and disgraceful that our women have fallen this far into an immoral quagmire pushed by communist leftist scum.
Abortion will always be the favoured stick for misogynists such as yourself, as well as the hypocritical “Holier than thou” brigade, to beat women with, such is your preoccupation with finding reasons to hate and look down on us whilst elevating your own status. According to one of your pals on here, women are akin ( or worse than ) to Mao, Hitler and Gengis Khan combined, in terms of our collective capacity for ‘mass murder.’
The fact that a man who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, enter certain professions and that nobody would notice if we all stopped working tomorrow because we contribute so little to society, is attempting to come off as morally superior is as pathetic as it is laughable.😂🤡
What about my body my choice for the unborn no one seems to care about that. Just because they can’t speak does mean they should have their rights taken from them. Sorry but totally with the author.
A long time ago I had a think about this question and I came to the conclusion that fundamentally there are only two possible way of looking at the issue:
1.) Either human life is sacred because we all have an unalienable right to life and nobody has the right to override that and change the basic rights that we have or
2.) We humans are free to set the rules whichever way it suits us; these rules can be changed as we deem fit.
The problem with option 2 is that following that principle anything is permissible. For example, right now Jews have the same rights as everyone else but, hey, maybe in a few years’ time someone will come along and change the rules because it doesn’t suit him and then we’re back to the gas chambers.
So I made up my mind a long time ago and my conclusion was that aborting an otherwise healthy baby at any stage of the pregnancy is equivalent to killing a human being.
(Fortunately I had a girlfriend who was of the same mindset, and as luck would have it, she did get pregnant accidentally. That boy is now 27 and married himself.)
Nothing will change my opinion. Feel free to disagree, hate me, abuse me, downvote me, whatever, it won’t change my mind.
By the way, the irony of the situation is that recently the government announced that parents who lose a baby due to miscarriage will be able to have a baby loss certificate and mourn over the baby just as if he/she had died after birth.
So on the one hand the same dead “fetus”:
(a) is a baby if he/she was wanted,
(b) not a baby if he/she was aborted.
However, as Orwell pointed out, the modern left-wing mindset is schizophrenic enough to hold two mutually contradictory opinions simultaneously.
It is the “pregnant accidentally” that for me is the conundrum. I can think of 8 or more adults my age (60s) who were adopted as babies/young children. They haven’t had easy lives and one wonders where the fathers had gone to that the mothers felt they had to give them up? The book the L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks should be read by men and women to get a flavour of what an unmarried mother faced in 1960s.
Do you know what phrase i absolutely hate hearing? “She got herself pregnant!” Shamefully, spoken by many women, too. Unless the woman/girl in question has a handy sample of sperm and a turkey baster, how on earth is it possible to get yourself pregnant??🤦♀️ But there we are again with a ‘2 birds with 1 stone’ example of women stabbing fellow women in the back whilst simultaneously allowing ‘The Invisible Man’ completely off the hook. For he is entirely absolved of all responsibility.🤷♀️
Unless the woman was unconcious during the procedure or so severly intoxicated that she didn’t realize what was going on anymore, she was one of the responsible (or irresponsible) parties involved here and without her conscious decision to take the risk, nothing would have happened.
Boris “Call me moron!” Becker (German tennis player of the 1980s and sometimes Wimbledon commenter with a habit about elaborating about women in the audience on camera instead of the game he was supposed to comment on) once famously once managed to “get fathered” as consequence of a cursory blowjob, something he coined the term Samenraub (sperm robbery) for. At least, that’s the story he told.
I had heard that it happened in a cupboard in the Nobu restaurant – but you have provided more details, all men should take more care of where they leave their sperm!
Excellent argument, thanks. Abortion apologists will go to any lengths to deny the fact that a foetus is a human being waiting to happen. As the author says admitting one has been wrong, especially with such weighty moral implications, is very challenging for many of us.
No intelligent decent-thinking abortion supporter could reasonably disagree with your conclusions. Abortion IS killing a baby. It’s simply a lie to suggest anything else. It’s not Lego or Meccano in there, it is flesh and blood, a living growing being.
Abortion abhors me, but despite my strong feelings on the subject, I wouldn’t make it illegal. I’d limit it to 12 weeks (extenuating circumstances excepted). 12 weeks is long enough to know if you want to have a baby or not.
This article could use some content beyond “I changed my mind and I’m now opposed to XY.” Or at least a link to some content.
I suspect there may be more male than female regular commenters below the line to DS articles, and there is some good discussion in these comments.
I am female and I always used to be pro choice, I was part of the generation that was massively encouraged by society/doctors to use the contraceptive pill, and a woman starting work at the end of the 80s where the prevailing message was that career (rather than family) was the most important thing for women. Louise Perry and Mary Harrington’s research and writing have now illustrated the very damaging aspects of both the contraceptive pill on women’s bodies/emotions/pair bonding, and most aspects of the sexual revolution on girls and women; and how the latter has led to the gruesome things we have today. Namely things like Onlyfans, freely available hugely damaging porn leading to terrible changes in sexual behaviour causing a massive uptick what boys think is “normal” and girls being hospitalised for (sorry to be direct) anal sex related injuries.
Abortion being seen as morally equivalent to contraception, never acknowledging what the process actually involves (especially in later term abortions) and now legislating to decriminalise abortion by the woman up to BIRTH is not only part of what Perry & Harrington write about, but also part of the left’s transition into a death cult, evidenced also by the appalling assisted suicide bill, which was sponsored by an MP funded by a group that used to have the name “The Euthanasia Society”.
One aspect that is not often commented on in the UK is the disgusting trade in aborted LIVE foetus body parts, and this being a major driver of the promotion of abortion to women in the US. See here re Planned Parenthood, a major abortion provider in the US.
https://x.com/daviddaleiden/status/1821525035343138905?s=19
https://x.com/catsscareme2021/status/1778889444797346059?s=19
Think that won’t go on in other countries including the UK? I doubt it. As with everything – follow the money.
So – in summary I have changed my mind. It’s a complex area and there are no easy answers but the current situation in the UK is appalling on many levels. Nobody wants to encourage back street abortions, but I believe a abortions should have a hugely reduced time limit and a narrow list of exceptions outside that time limit including being related to real risk to the mother’s life, the recent decriminalisation up to birth should be reversed, all selling of aborted body parts should be outlawed; and society must face up to what abortion actually is.
We have now reached a place in the moral collapse of society where many women – off their heads on the powerful drug of privileged righteousness injected into their veins over decades by hyper-aggressive state-managed feminists – genuinely believe they have the right to murder their own child if they believe that murder will make their life more convenient. It’s the same place where these same brainwashed women greedily excuse themselves of any responsibility by finding a moral scapegoat – men. The same place where these same broken and irrational women demand that men accept responsibility for the creation of life but demand that they must have no responsibility for the termination of that same life. This is the place where women support the murder of their children and admonish men for the actions of women whilst demanding men have no say. The same place where we are aghast at the thought of female genital mutilation but turn a blind eye to the ongoing legalised genital mutilation of boys. The same place where women become men and men become women, sometimes literally. The same place where we encourage children to have their body and mind cut into pieces and put back together to make something different. The same place where an emasculated, morally corrupt, narcissistic, logic-free, sick society is being kicked relentlessly to the ground by the malevolent forces that created that society. And the same place where that lost, aggressively feminised, society no longer has the courage or will to fight. For what would it be fighting for? We are at the beginning of the end.
Oh how far the human race has advanced, we are indeed at the beginning of the end…
You will never stop abortions. They have been carried out throughout history – illegally and dangerously – but they were carried out because the woman carrying the baby thought the risk was worth the consequences FOR HER of continuing with the pregnancy.
If abortion was made illegal (it won’t) all that will happen is a growth in dangerous, illegal, back-street abortions.
I personally find the Infanticide Bill (because that’s what it really is) absolutely disgusting. It will lead to very late abortions with many carried out in certain “communities,” at great risk to the mother, who may have little say in the matter, because the baby is female.
I believe the current limit on legal abortions – 24 weeks – is far too late. I would support a general limit of 12 weeks – with an absolute maximum of 18 weeks in a very limited range of cases.
No female should be able to have more than two NHS abortions.
Abortion makes a peculiar difficulty for Christians: at what point when God made Mary pregnant did that bundle of cells become Christ? Was it not until birth or at 23 weeks or 12 weeks or was it straightaway?
No difficulty for me, especially not a ‘peculiar’ one. “He (God) knitted me together in my mother’s womb”. Right minded people know what abortion is and it’s not ‘reproductive health care’
Whilst I believe the termination limit should be brought down to 12 weeks, I do not think anyone has the right to tell a women what to do with her body, there are many reasons women choose abortions, and she didn’t get pregnant by herself, so when are men going to be villified in the same way?
💯 👏
Except it’s not just her body. There’s another human being involved, growing inside her. The father being around or not doesn’t change that fact. Vilify whoever you want to vilify, its still another human being inside her.
One could legitimately argue that the mother has no right to kill that person growing inside her. It wouldn’t be my argument, but it’s still a legitimate argument.
She wouldn’t have gotten pregnant with a decision to have sex with a man (just in case someone forgot this, it’s not a legal requirement for anything) and it’s not the man who’ll have to make the ultimate decision about terminating the pregnancy. In both case, she’s responsible for her own actions and hence, people who disagree with her decisions will criticize them.
Excellent article, which asks all the right questions. Excellent and intelligent discussion below the line, too. I hope DS will make this subject a standing order.
Those in favour of abortion cite different stages during pregnancy after which it should not be allowed. So if someone believes it’s when the heartbeat starts (@22days) is it only murder after that in X’s eyes? Or is it actually murder? Or Y believes it’s when the unborn is viable outside the womb. So X believes Y is wrong, ‘my truth’ rules supreme and unborn babies die on subjective grounds.
I suggest to that the ‘pro-choicers’ who say that it is only a ‘potential life,’ if they were aborted on day 1 of their mother’s pregnancy would not ‘potentially’ be destroyed, they would actually be destroyed.
It’s a life from conception (what else could it be?) and every abortion destroys a life.
Doesn’t this law refer to women who abort their child after 24 weeks of pregnancy. I was amazed that the infanticide law didn’t come up.
On a practical level what methods are available for these women.
One cannot argue that this is not infanticide at such a late gestation
Smash the head of the child with a hammer before cutting the umbilical cord. That’s basically the procedure the progressive left wants to legalize as they don’t consider children people until completely separated from their mothers.
#bekind, as they like to call this themselves.