Redefining Life and Law

A free public post on the brazen tactics of UK abortion activists

A tragic and surprising story featured in the UK news this week. Carla Foster, 44, mother of three, was given a 28 month sentence for illegally inducing the abortion of her 32-34 week old baby in May 2020. 

The case is galling for so many reasons. 

When the COVID lockdown began in March 2020, Foster was forced to move back in with her estranged partner whilst pregnant with another man’s baby. She regularly Googled ways to end a late term pregnancy. Eventually, via the “pills by post” scheme, which allowed women to conduct abortions of up to 10 weeks at home during lockdown, Foster procured abortion pills by lying to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, giving the impression she was around 7 weeks pregnant. Eventually, she had to call paramedics. Her baby daughter, Lily, arrived stillborn during the call.

There are further details, but that’s the outline. Unsurprisingly, the case has sparked controversy, with pro-abortion voices calling for a change in the law.

For Christians following the story, there is much to be said, but many of us feel we have said it and heard it all said before. Despite the profundity of the issue, debate around it has grown tiresome—especially when abortion seems a settled issue in the UK, which has the most liberal abortion laws in Europe, alongside the Netherlands.

Yet, tiresome as these debates may seem, we should pay attention to what’s been said this week.

Abortion is not the political hot potato in the UK that it is in the US, and so these kinds of stories come up less often. If we are paying attention, then, it is perhaps easier to notice how, despite the apparently settled status of UK abortion, pro-abortion advocates are still gradually attempting to shift the Overton Window—that is, the range of acceptable views—on the topic

Enter Stella Creasy MP—Labour frontbencher and vocal advocate of UK abortion rights. 

This week, Creasy has done the media round on this story, appearing on Newsnight and writing a column in the The Guardian, among other things. In so doing, Creasy attempted nothing less than a brazen redefinition of two key terms relating to abortion: legality and viability.

If you were watching carefully, what Creasy has attempted is quite breathtaking. She was so brazen that she was able to hide in plain sight. I could barely believe it as I read and watched her, and have had to rewatch and reread to be sure I wasn’t seeing things.

Redefining Legality

Creasy appeared on Newsnight on Monday, opposite pro-life ethicist James Mumford. You can watch it on iPlayer, starting at the 33 minute mark.

At the start of the interview, Creasy stated:

“When you say ‘abortion is legal in this country’—actually it’s not. It is allowed under some circumstances that you will not be prosecuted.”

Host Victoria Derbyshire then corrected her, pointing out that abortion is legal in the UK up to 24 weeks in all circumstances, and much later, even up to term, in others.

Creasy, however, disagreed.

“No, it’s only legal in Northern Ireland, where there is a human rights framework which explicitly says you have a legal right to have an abortion. In this country [i.e. England], you are exempted from prosecution under this very legislation if you fulfil certain conditions—so, if two doctors say that if you didn’t have an abortion it would cause greater harm.”

Creasy refers here to the 2020 Abortion Regulations in Northern Ireland—something forced upon Northern Ireland by Westminster, which decriminalised abortion entirely on the part of the woman, even though the 24 week limit remains in place.

So, Creasy claims here that abortion is legal in Northern Ireland but not legal in England. But a quick look at a few dictionaries gives the relevant definition of “legal” here as “conforming to or permitted by law or established rules”. This seems to fit abortion in England perfectly: it is permitted by law or established rules. The fact that those rules stipulate “under certain circumstances” does not, then, make abortion illegal in any usual sense of the term. Almost all laws are about declaring things permissible or impermissible in certain circumstances. There are very few things which are legal tout court.

Take walking. Largely, I can walk freely in England. In Scotland, with its more generous rights of way, I could walk more freely still. And, indeed, I have a right to freedom of movement. But if I walked across an airport runway without a security badge, or strode uninvited across the yard of Buckingham Palace during the changing of the guard, no one would dispute my arrest. And it would not then follow that walking itself is basically illegal unless otherwise stated. Rather, walking remains legal, and under most circumstances I will not be prosecuted for it.

Before the very eyes of Newsnight viewers, Creasy was attempting to redefine a fundament of society: law itself. She does not want it to mean “permitted by law” but rather “never, in any circumstances, restricted by law”. She wants “abortion is legal” to mean “abortion is an inalienable human right”. This was an awe-inspiring level of sophistry.

Creasy is smart enough to know that her newfound definition of “illegality”—that is, something which may at some point be subject to restriction—is nonsense. So what is she up to? 

Creasy almost certainly wants to push the envelope further on abortion limits in the UK. If you think she’s not someone who wants to abolish all legal limits, then you’re a fool. But how can she achieve that when most women in the UK actually think abortion limits should be lower than they are?

Well, this is one way: shift people’s definition of “legal” so that they think abortion is still “illegal”. 9/10 Brits identify as pro-choice, and so, if you can make them think that abortion is still basically illegal, they will want to legalise it—which Creasy tells them means is synonymous with making it a human right. And once it’s a human right, it will become impossible to restrict. And hey presto, we’ll have unlimited abortion in the UK.

Redefining Viability

Perhaps even more shocking than her slippery redefinition of legality this week has been Creasy’s treatment of “viability”. 

On Newsnight, James Mumford rightly pointed out no one is paying attention to the greatest tragedy in this story: the killing of a child that was “sentient or conscious, healthy, viable, ready to be born at 8 months gestation.”

Creasy took issue with this—but not by asserting (though I’m sure she thinks this) that Foster had the right to kill her 8 month old unborn child if she wished. Rather, Creasy described Mumford’s remarks as “just not accurate… The evidence presented to the court was not that the child had taken a breath.” She continued:

“That’s not what the medical evidence said… You simply can’t stack that statement up. I think in a case as sensitive as this, given the evidence that was presented to the court, it’s really important that we’re clear about what the actual evidence presented to the court said.”

Creasy then made a typical pro-abortionist move and began to talk about extreme cases of foetal abnormality and such (as an side, always remember when this happens: hard cases make bad law). Mumford then sensibly redirected the conversation back to the Foster story:

MUMFORD: “We’re talking about, in this case, a child that was viable.”

CREASY: “That’s not what the medical evidence said… I’m sorry, you simply can’t stack that statement up…”

MUMFORD: “The child was 32 weeks/8 months old, and so I think the child, we would say, was viable, given that viability is where the threshold is at 24 weeks”

CREASY: “…I’m really sorry, but this is a really important point given that you’ve raised it—and no doubt people will be watching this and will be rightly distressed by this, because this is a distressing case. But that’s simply not what the evidence said. It wasn’t proven that the child had drawn a breath”

Again, a quick dictionary consultation gives the definition of “viable” as “capable of living.” It does not mean “currently alive.” But the latter is precisely what Creasy tried to make it mean. This is quite something. It’s so shameless, and was done in such plain sight, that I wonder whether Mumford (who performed admirably against Creasy’s belligerence) couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing in the studio and ended up somewhat blindsided.

Every time Mumford raised the point that the child was viable, Creasy made recourse to it having never “drawn a breath.” This is true—but it is beside the point. A foetus being “viable” means it would be able to draw breath outside the womb if delivered safely. Baby Lily, however, was forced out of the womb before she was ready by an abortifacient drug, and died in the process. 

What impression was Creasy trying to give here? That Baby Lily died from some other cause? That she would never have survived outside the womb? In a Guardian column the following day, she stated that the coroner’s report refutes Mumford’s claim that Baby Lily was sentient and viable.

But for all her reference to the evidence given to the court, Creasy flies in the face of the judge’s sentencing remarks, which stated that “Post-mortem examination confirmed that the pregnancy was between 32-34 weeks’ gestation at the time of this offence. There was no sign of natural disease or trauma that could explain her death.” Creasy, then, is a barefaced liar. These remarks reinforce what we all plainly know to be the case: had Baby Lily been born at term, or even if she’d been born at 32-34 weeks under different circumstances, she would have drawn breath easily.  She was, by any commonly understood definition of the term, viable.

Again: what is Creasy up to? Well, she is aware that “viability” is what decides where, in our current setup, the rights of the mother are balanced against the rights of the child. But, as is obvious, Creasy wants the mother’s right to supersede at all times and in all situations. Yet she knows she could not get away with coming out and advocating for that in the UK (yet). And so, she has decided to redefine viability. And if viability now means “alive” rather than “capable of living”, hey presto, no foetus is viable and all abortions are permissible. You’ve got to hand it to her: shrewd move.

As stated earlier: it is easy to tire of abortion debates, to feel that they carry on as they always have, with nothing new under the sun. But that is not how the likes of Creasy see it. They are not tired. They are organised and aggressive. They will not stop until all limits are removed. They are willing to redefine the very words and concepts which have set the terms of the abortion debate—and to do so live on national TV. British Christians must pay attention, and push back swiftly and with force.

We should not see abortion as a settled issue in the UK. At 24 weeks, our abortion limit is the joint most liberal in Europe. Most EU countries set it at 10 to 12 weeks. Achieving a reduction to that limit could be an achievable medium term goal for British Christians, if we put our minds to it. British evangelicals fear to do this however, forever hampered as we are by a chronic embarrassment over our American cousins and their single-minded devotion to overturning Roe v. Wade. 

But they did it. Creasy and her ilk are painfully aware of this. After the Roe decision, she moved swiftly to try and have abortion enshrined as a human right in the UK. She knows that what happened in America, and what happens in Europe, could happen here—that’s why she’s willing to behave as she has done this week. If British Christians care at all about stopping her, we must pay attention to her shrewdness—the shrewdness of the serpent, devoid of the innocence of the dove.