Wombs and Tombs

This country now has 48 abortions for every 100 live births. That is not because Muslims do not want daughters. Muslims are not keen on abortion, and there are far too few of them to produce those numbers.

China is less than two per cent Muslim, and there are only 200,000 Muslims, mostly foreign workers, among the 51.75 million inhabitants of South Korea. Taiwan is less than one per cent Muslim, as is Vietnam. The Muslim 14 per cent of the population of India accounts for only 6.6 per cent of sex-selective abortions in the country that accounts for 50 per cent of the world's missing female births. Like the husband who murdered her, Anu Bansal was a Hindu, as are 86.7 per cent of those who procure female foeticide, although Hindus are only 80 per cent of the population. The figures for Sikhs are 4.9 and 1.7. The practice is increasingly evident among the richer residents of the urban areas of Nepal, which is proportionally the most Hindu country in the world.

There is a certain culture of female infanticide in urban Pakistan, but Muhammad explicitly condemned it, since it had been prevalent in pre-Islamic Arabia, and British Pakistanis mostly descend from the God-fearing countryside, with even New Mirpur City only the seventy-fourth most populous. There is no such culture in Bangladesh. Were a Bill to ban sex-selective abortion to come before the House of Commons, then be in no doubt that those voting for the ban would include Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Iqbal Mohamed and Ayoub Khan.

Even before the formal decriminalisation of abortion, this figure comes less than a week after a Prime Minister who was in favour of assisted suicide had been unable to make the case in principle against the death penalty. The legalisation of assisted suicide would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment. My paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote, and my maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and perhaps especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why. Even if we had made it past the industrial scale abortion that disproportionately targeted us, then we would face euthanasia as yet another lethal weapon in the deadly armoury of our mortal enemies, alongside their wars, alongside their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, alongside Police brutality and other street violence, alongside the numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, and now putatively alongside the death penalty.

This is class and race war, and we must fight to the death. That death must not be ours, but the death of the global capitalist system. Having subjected itself to that system to a unique extent, Britain is uniquely placed to overthrow it, and to replace it with an order founded on the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications.

Without a robust material realism, there can be no pursuit of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, led by those who suffered most as a result of economic inequality, namely the working class, and led by those who suffered most as a result of international conflict, namely the working class and the youth. Feelings are real, but they are not facts. As poverty of aspiration is a real feeling, but economic inequality is a fact, so gender identity is a real feeling, but biological sex is a fact. Those who failed to hold the first line cannot hold the second, and those who are failing to hold the second line will be unable to hold the first.

Demonstrably, then, dialectical materialism has too often failed to provide that robust basis. Nor, in itself, can natural science, which cannot prove the ontological existence of material reality, but rather presupposes it. What is needed is Thomism, which by definition exists within the wider Augustinian tradition. Fundamental to both is absolute fidelity to the Roman Magisterium, which is itself irrevocably committed to the Thomist metaphysical system, within which its own indispensable role precludes any degeneration comparable to that of much of the ancestrally Marxian Left into gender self-identification.

At least until the base of Blairite Eurocommunism and of Starmerite Pabloism wanted to abort boys as part of its demonisation of working-class and nonwhite males, which leads to violence that is not restricted to, but which undoubtedly includes, sexual humiliation such as at Medomsley Detention Centre, and such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a June 2024 report that was also highly critical of Hamas, found to be inflicted on Palestinian men and boys by the Israeli Defence Forces. A month later, the unrepentant Sde Teiman rapists held a defiant press conference, and their supporters rioted, among them Members of the Knesset and men in the uniforms of the IDF's Force 100. Fear of the black male is fundamental to the capitalist system that was founded on the transatlantic slave trade, and the slave trade financed enclosure. There has always been One Struggle.

Accordingly, the Scotland of the post-Sturgeon SNP is moving formally to legalise sex-selective abortion. Whatever happened to gender self-identification? Was sex not "assigned at birth"? On what pro-choice grounds could anyone object to this particular choice? If half of unborn children were male, in the old-fashioned sense of having Y chromosomes, then how could they be part of a woman's body? And in that case, then how could the other half be part of that body, either?

Yet never in British history has there been a prosecution for sex-selective abortion. In 2013, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, declined to bring charges against two doctors who had been caught on camera agreeing to arrange abortions of girls because of their sex. He wrote to the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, that, "The law does not, in terms, expressly prohibit gender-specific abortions; rather it prohibits any abortion carried out without two medical practitioners having formed a view, in good faith, that the health risks of continuing with a pregnancy outweigh those of termination." Starmer had concluded that there would be no public interest in a prosecution. That has been the conclusion in every such case.

The NHS is funding the experimental testing of puberty blockers on children after the original experiment on sheep had had to be abandoned because the blockers had caused impaired memory, altered behaviour, enlarged amygdala, and lasting brain damage even once the treatment had stopped. What say you, Wes Streeting? But then, the law forbids the inhumane killing of third trimester vertebrate fetuses of any species except our own. Margaret Thatcher abolished the time limit on abortion where there was "a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped", of which the risk did not need to be quantified, nor the abnormalities specified. Even before that fig leaf is discarded, this country already has 48 abortions for every 100 live births.