Today, on the 43rd anniversary of the passing of the Abortion Act, Christian Concern has launched a new campaign urging politicians and members of the public to ‘stop and think’ about abortion.
The event was marked with a silent vigil outside the Houses of Parliament followed by a national service of lament in Westminster addressed by the former Bishop of Rochester, the Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali.
Since the 1967 Act was passed, over 7 million babies have been aborted in Britain, with more than 200,000 taking place in 2009 alone.
However, a poll undertaken last weekend by ComRes (commissioned by Christian Concern) has revealed widespread ignorance of these simple facts.
It has shown that nearly one-third of all people (30%) think fewer than 20,000 abortions take place in Britain each year, and that one in ten (10%) think the figure is 20,000-50,000. A further 41% said they did not know and only 3% got within 50,000 of the actual number by estimating a figure between 150,000 and 250,000.
7 million abortions. The numbers are staggering: 450,000 Dunblanes, 300,000 classrooms, 70 Wembleys. More than the 6 million Jews who died in the Nazi holocaust. Over 10 million British citizens lost – as many of the dead would now be parents!
Britain now has amongst the most liberal abortion practice in the western world. One in three women has an abortion. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion: on average one abortion every 2 minutes and 40 seconds, 572 per day.
Abortion has of course been practised at some level by most societies for millennia but legalized abortion on a massive scale is a relatively recent phenomenon only made possible by permissive abortion laws and new technology.
The worldwide figure, according to the Guttmacher Institute, is 46 million. This is a staggering figure given that the total number of deaths worldwide from all other causes is not much higher at 56 million.
Moreover it is having devastating effects demographically. In India and China, selective abortion of female babies has contributed to a severe imbalance in the male female ratio with 50 million girls estimated missing in India alone.
In the Western and former communist worlds where birthrates are low abortion has contributed to a huge increase in the number of elderly people relative to those in the workforce leading some to suggest that the generation which killed its children (by abortion) will in turn be killed by its children (through euthanasia).
There is no one more vulnerable, more innocent, or killed in greater numbers than the child in the womb but there is clearly still a huge amount of work to be done in making British people aware of the level of the problem.