Lyndon Letter March 2020

B69

Lyndon Bowring CHAIRMAN

March 2020

Two of my favourite journalists in recent years have been John Humphrys, recently retired from BBC Radio 4’s prestigious Today Programme and Charles Moore, the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher. One from a humble background just a few miles from where I grew up in Wales, and the other from a background that was privileged. So, late last year, Celia and I were absolutely thrilled to join a 500-strong audience at the Emmanuel Centre – just around the corner from CARE’s offices in Westminster – for an evening with the two of them ‘in conversation’. It made for a riveting event!

THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE UNBORN CHILD We also listened intently on 28 December when Charles Moore was the Today Programme’s guest editor. He commented that many Christians believe abortion to be wrong because it takes away the life of an innocent child, yet no-one had ever been allowed to speak against abortion on its Thought for the Day! He decided to use the fact that it was Holy Innocents Day to make this point and chose ‘the exceptionally courageous’ Bishop of Portsmouth, Philip Egan to speak. This is part of what he said:

‘Today, we remember the children massacred by King Herod in his attempt to kill the infant Jesus … he had all the male children in Bethlehem and its surrounding district killed, who were two years old or under. It makes me ask how we safeguard the most vulnerable creature of all, the unborn child in its mother’s womb: innocent, dependent, defenceless. It always seems strange to me that in a culture saturated with human rights, the rights of the unborn child

are at times relativised and overridden. I know this is a divisive issue, but how can we be concerned about nature, climate change and respect for life, if we fail to protect the unborn child?’

From the beginning, CARE has worked tirelessly – alongside other admirable charities – on this very issue. We believe that each unborn child, and each pregnant woman, is created

by God, in His image. We will therefore never cease to defend their right to be protected and supported. A woman facing an unplanned pregnancy needs space and support as she decides about the future. The options of keeping her baby or having him or her adopted should be weighed against the all-too-often-given advice to terminate the pregnancy. Government figures for England and Wales reported that over 200,000 abortions were carried out in 2018 – more than in any of the previous 50 years. This is a spiritual battle, so may I encourage you to continue to pray about this tragedy especially remembering the medical and nursing staff who face these issues on a daily basis. Our Ten Ways to Pray for Life prayer resource is freely available from CARE.

ABORTION PROVIDERS Almost all UK abortions are funded by the NHS and a large proportion are outsourced to charities like the British Pregnancy Advice Service and Marie Stopes International (MSI). What is often left unsaid, is that abortion is a lucrative business. In 2018, the income of MSI, which performs 4.8 million abortions in 37 developing countries, was nearly £300 million. Since 2006, their funding from the British Government increased by over 5,000 per cent! Apparently, their chief executive was rewarded by their board of trustees with doubling his salary to £434,500 in recognition of MSI’s success and record number of terminations. This put him in the top ten highest earners in the UK charity sector. On top of that, the official health service watchdog, the Care Quality Commission, reported that a Marie Stopes clinic had paid bonuses to staff who encouraged more women to go through with a termination. They have also repeatedly highlighted safety concerns at some Marie Stopes clinics. The abortion industry is clearly, and tragically, a profitable one. A brief report about this along with other background information about MSI’s history is available free from CARE, by email or through the post.

Marie Stopes herself is widely regarded as a feminist hero and women’s rights campaigner.

Guardian readers voted her ‘Woman of the Millennium’ and the Royal Mail included her in a 2008 collection of six stamps celebrating women pioneers.

But there was a darker side to her character. It seems that Marie Stopes promoted birth control because she believed society would be better off without certain kinds of people.

She provided these services in deprived areas to reduce the birth rate of poor lower-class people she considered to be ‘the inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded’. Stopes lobbied Parliament to enforce compulsory sterilisation of ‘the hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.’ Unsurprisingly she approved of Hitler’s eugenics policies and sent him a volume of her love poems in 1939. At the height of the Holocaust, she wrote: ‘Catholics and Prussians, the Jews and the Russians, all are a curse, or something worse…’ Stopes actually disinherited her son Harry because his wife had ‘an inherited disease of the eyes which not only makes her

wear hideous glasses so that it is horrid to look at her, but the awful curse will carry on and I have the horror of our line being so contaminated.’ All these quotations are drawn from the report mentioned previously.

HUMAN RIGHT OR TRAGEDY? Many people today believe passionately in human rights – indeed this is an idea born out of our Christian faith – they include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education. Vocal proMarie Stopes commemorated abortion campaigners are calling for access to abortion on a stamp without official sanction under the pretence of the woman’s ‘reproductive rights’. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is often difficult and can be a last resort for a woman in very difficult circumstances – sometimes victims of coercion or domestic violence. It can also be a traumatic experience with significant health implications.

Surely the Government should invest in helping women who may be facing huge emotional, social and financial pressures to terminate their pregnancies.

CARE supports the Pregnancy Centres Network which offers resources, training and encouragement to over 60 local independent centres with a Christian ethos. These centres freely give practical, compassionate support to women facing an unplanned pregnancy or struggling with pregnancy loss. CARE’s Open ministry reaches out to those in our churches affected by these issues and helps clergy and other leaders to care for them. Charities like Life provide housing, counselling, parenting advice and baby equipment; serving hundreds of women and their families every week. Christians have done this throughout the centuries with Roman Catholics in particular faithfully speaking out – long before evangelicals took up this fight for life. We shudder at King Herod’s wicked infanticide. Matthew 2:18 says, ‘Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’

Is the global daily termination of 125,000 unborn lives, 600 of them in Britain, so very different?

What weeping and great mourning that surely brings.

LIBERALISING THE LAW Historically, Northern Ireland had one of the most life-affirming abortion laws in Europe because the 1967 Abortion Act, which made abortion legal in England, Scotland and Wales, did not apply there. 100,000 people are therefore alive today who might otherwise have been aborted. And yet, last year pro-abortion English, Welsh and Scottish politicians in Westminster hijacked a routine Bill about administrative arrangements in Northern Ireland by adding an amendment that, at present, legalises abortion for any reason up to when a baby is

capable of being born alive. They’re now determined to extend these measures to the rest of the UK. CARE is working hard in the expectation that similar changes could be introduced in England and Wales through the Domestic Abuse Bill.

GRACE AND TRUTH One of CARE’s manifesto points aspires to a society where ‘all unborn children are protected and mothers supported’. Maybe the day will come when the killing of babies in the womb becomes unthinkable. Opinions can change when people are prepared to fight on behalf of the vulnerable and voiceless. We are committed to making afresh the arguments for protecting both the lives of women and babies.

Do take a few minutes to visit our new website! We believe it will be a very important tool, informing more people about this issue and all our other areas of work.

Let’s never give up working to end the tragedy of millions of lost lives through abortion, always seeking to maintain an attitude of grace and truth in our campaigning and our care for women, always remembering that both lives matter.

Thank you for standing with us in this ‘fight for life’. We could never achieve what we do without your giving, praying and steadfast support.

Yours in Christ,

Lyndon Bowring CHAIRMAN

CAREORGUK

CARE.ORG.UK

CARE (Christian Action Research & Education) | Chief Executive Nola Leach | Chairman Rev Lyndon Bowring 53 Romney St, London, SW1P 3RF | 020 7233 0455 | mail@care.org.uk | Charity No: 1066963 | Scottish Charity No: SC038911