The Vision To Foresee The Disaster

Peter Day-Milne writes:

Earlier this year, the House of Lords debated an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill that would have stopped it from fully decriminalising self-induced abortions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, to her credit, spoke in favour of this amendment, and she and the nine other bishops who were present voted for it. This is good. Too few people, however, remember that her episcopal forebears had a large role in the making and passing of the Abortion Act in the first place, and so helped bring about the present nightmarish, dystopian reality in which we kill one third of children in the womb. A number of facts from the public record suggest themselves here, and may, one hopes, move – or, indeed, shame – the Archbishop and her colleagues to greater firmness on this issue.

The parliamentary campaign for legal abortion began with two bills put forward in the Commons in 1961 and 1965, but both failed before reaching the Lords. The first abortion bill to come before the bishops and their temporal colleagues was Lord Silkin’s Abortion Bill of 1965, which proposed to permit abortion on the grounds of ‘grave risk’ of ‘serious injury’ to the mental or physical health of the mother; risk of deformity; maternal incapacity for childrearing; or if the mother conceived the child when under the age of 16, or as a result of rape.

Two bishops spoke on the second reading of this bill. First, the bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, ‘deplored’ attempts to scupper it, and praised its author’s effort to treat abortion ‘intelligently, as befits an adult society’. Later, the bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer – sometime Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford – also spoke, arguing ‘It is possible to say that the foetus, the unborn baby, is not a member of the human race in the ordinary sense of those words, but that it has a potentiality of so becoming… Where there is a grave threat to her life, to her physical health or to her mental health, we maintain that abortion may be legitimate.’ If we recall that the majority of Britain’s approximately 250,000 annual abortions are now performed on ‘mental health’ grounds, we will have reason to be suspicious of this muddled, cod-Thomistic argument.

At the end of this second reading debate, the bishops voted three to none in favour of the bill’s moving to the committee stage, joining sixty four non-Catholic lords temporal in the ‘Content’ lobby. Only eight peers voted against the bill, seven of them Catholics. One of these was the 9th Baron Vaux of Harrowden, better known as the Rev Dom Gabriel Gilbey OSB of Ampleforth Abbey. Throughout the Lords’ debates on abortion, his speeches ensured that the House heard at least one genuine priestly voice (‘[The bill] … opens up vistas of the wholesale slaughter of unborn babies… [do not] add your voice to the voice of the primeval tempter by saying to the whole medical profession: “Ye shall be as gods”.’).

Dom Gabriel’s warnings were not heeded, and this bill of 1965 proceeded to the committee stage. There the bishops of Exeter and Southwark expressed cautious support for abortion on the grounds of foetal deformity. Southwark said of his visit to a ward for seriously deformed children: ‘Whether or not they were human is a theological problem beyond my understanding. All I can say is that if it were possible to know in advance that one could prevent the birth of those children, I am sure that one should have prevented it.’ The Bishop of Leicester took a more straightforward view: he declared himself willing to support a clause allowing abortion where deformity was, in his words, ‘more likely than not’.

The bishops of Southwark and Leicester also voted to retain the clause in Lord Silkin’s bill that would have made conception under the age of 16 an automatic ground for abortion. Leicester said of such cases: ‘Whether we have an abortion or whether we have an adoption, there will probably be in both cases some traumatic experience, but, for myself, I feel that the shorter of two processes is more likely to be beneficial than, or at any rate not so harmful as, the longer.’ The Lords sent Lord Silkin’s bill to the Commons in March 1966, just before the prorogation of Parliament, and the Commons had no time to consider it. Yet in the debate on second reading in November 1965, the bishop of Exeter had already made a very pregnant suggestion. The Church of England, he said, had produced a draft Abortion Bill; would Lord Silkin consider asking some of the bishops to help him put forward a fresh bill along its lines?

Exeter was referring to the draft bill included in the report Abortion: An Ethical Discussion, which the Church of England’s Committee for Social Responsibility had just published. This report, written by a group of ten ethicists and medical doctors, of whom four were in Anglican orders, recommended that abortion be allowed in cases of ‘serious threat’ to the ‘psycho-physical well-being’ of the mother. This threat was to be assessed in terms of the ‘total environment’ of the mother, including factors such as her number of children, her finances and the like. The report and its attached draft bill were greatly to influence the parliamentary efforts that culminated in the Abortion Act 1967, and many echoes of its wording appear in that legislation.

To return to the Lords in 1966: Lord Silkin’s first bill ran out of parliamentary time in March of that year. One month later, in the next session of Parliament, he introduced a new bill, replicating the final text of the first as amended and passed by the Lords. This bill, too, received strong support from the Lords Spiritual, which was not surprising given that they had done much to shape the earlier version.

Nonetheless, Lord Silkin’s second bill also failed to pass through the Commons. The next bill, that of 1967, was the one that became law as the Abortion Act 1967. It began in the Commons, where it was introduced by David Steel. Having passed through the Commons, it progressed swiftly through its readings in the Lords. In its final form, it permitted abortion when two doctors agreed either that:

(a) the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(b) ‘there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped’.

As Lord Vaux observed, this would, in practice, soon become a licence for abortion on demand.

Towards the end of the bill’s passage through the Lords, the bishops voted four to none against a wrecking amendment. By this time, Ian Ramsey, sometime Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford and co-author of Abortion: An Ethical Discussion, was sitting in the Lords as bishop of Durham. In the debate on the successful bill he said of the human foetus: ‘I do not talk about its life; I think that is semantically as scandalous and problematic as things can be.’

Such being the attitude of the established church, which had in fact drafted no little part of it, the Abortion Act 1967 passed through the Lords and became law. Now, fifty-eight years on, approximately a quarter of a million abortions are performed in Britain each year under the very same Act. Today, Anglican bishops generally avoid talking about abortion, for they are afraid of upsetting the now powerful conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England, which took up the pro-life cause in the late 1970s and is now strongly committed to it. But today’s episcopal silence should not make us forget that the bishops of the 1960s developed, supported and voted for the very legislation that has enabled our civilisation to destroy itself with a self-inflicted genocide. At the time, when so little was known about abortion and its effects, only the Catholic peers – blind slaves of dogma in Anglican eyes – had the vision to foresee the disaster. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury is to be commended for her speech and vote on 18 March. The question is – can the Church of England be prophetic about abortion today in a way that it utterly failed to be in the 1960s?