Ed West wrote an excellent article last week on Nadine Dorries MP, concerning a matter which was largely ignored by most of the left-leaning, abortion-promoting MSM (pace The Independent).One does indeed have to admire her bravery in walking a very lonely path to talk about abortion and its impact on women.
As a qualified nurse, she has experienced first-hand the horrors of the barbarism: “It’s something that has stuck with me my whole life,” she says. “I can still smell the sluice stream. I can still hear the sluice machine while I stood by the bed, watching this child die in the bedpan.”
And when you read stories like this one, you would be wise to consider the question of abortion again and again. For we are not simply sacrificing foetuses to Molech, and neither are we concerned with a bunch of parasitical cells feeding off the host.
We are talking about our babies.
Nadine Dorries is right to point out that abortion is viewed as a form of contraception, ‘rather than the ending of a life, or a potential life’. In the lustful passion of a fleeting moment, who cares about contraception when you can always ‘get rid of it’?
And now we move to the era of ‘DIY abortions’: Vera Drake has become the cornerstone of the family and a pillar of the community. But at least she was present to comfort those girls who were ‘in trouble’. The ‘DIY’ development means ‘very young girls going home with a couple of tablets alone in their bedroom, to experience pain in a way they have never experienced’.
Imagine it: you get a pre-natal indication that your baby may be suffering from Downs, so off you trundle back home, tablets in hand, to terminate the abnormality and prevent a ‘wrongful life’.
Ms Dorries’ analysis of how ‘Broken Britain’ came about is astute:
The problem is the churches have withdrawn. Where I grew up the priest was king. We were scared of priests – the same with the vicars. The Church played a very important role. The Church set boundaries. So did schools, doctors, district nurses. But the Church withdrew, the state became anonymous and society went into freefall. One of the things about the Big Society is to try to put those boundaries back.While His Grace has no desire at all to return to the era when the priest was king (no, indeed), he does regret the loss of respect for authority, reverence for institutions and admiration for moral conviction, honest industry and personal achievement.
But the Church has to step up to the plate. Although they get involved in charitable works they tend to be on the state-funded fringes and I’m not talking about that type of role. I’m talking about a micro level. I’m talking about priests working with communities and admitting to a level of authority they used to.
Charity has been eroded, it’s just become another arm of the state. The Catholic Church has had a huge beating and it has to recover from that. Maybe the Big Society and the opportunities it presents to the Catholic Church may be part of the healing process for the Church.
But when the authorities prove to be liars and the institutions corrupt, it is perhaps no wonder that respect evaporates and cynicism pervades. And into this vacuum moves the relativity of a libertarian anarchy: the right of each to be as he wishes, believes as he wants, define as he wills; the deification of quantum mechanics and the assertion that we are but random atoms in pursuit of our individual interest to the detriment of the collective provision.
In 2008, Nadine Dorries campaigned almost single-handedly to reduce the abortion time limit to 20 weeks.
Today she leads the ‘Right to Know’ campaign, which focuses on giving women the objective facts about abortion and placing before them the alternatives. All across Europe, there is legislation requiring informed consent, and these countries have significantly lower abortion rates.
In the UK, there is no requirement in law for women to be informed about the abortion procedure or the alternatives. It is to be observed that the Government only funds abortion providers if the abortion proceeds. And yet it is these same providers which are entrusted to counsel vulnerable and often emotional women before the procedure is carried out.
And so we abort on average 200,000 babies every year.
That amounts to 572 abortions per day.
It is a boom industry, with some companies making many millions of pounds from the taxpayer through NHS referral.
Ms Dorries says: “Women don’t know that they have a 30 per cent chance of experiencing mental health problems after having an abortion. They don’t know there are links with various other medical conditions. They are given no advice. If you want to continue with the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption you are not given support or help. They are just spoken to and channelled straight in to an abortion clinic where they have their abortion in a factory-like manner, then ejected into the street, given no follow-up, no support, no kindly words of help or advice and only provided with any degree of counselling after the abortion if they’ve already signed and agreed to continue.”
She concludes: “The way abortion takes place in this country is an abuse of women.”
Ed West observes:
Those unfamiliar with the world of blogs and social networking site Twitter will not fully appreciate how much hatred Dorries attracts over this issue, the majority of which seems to come from men, who devote an almost demented amount of time tapping at keyboards explaining why they hate this woman. “What have I done to justify this level of vitriol?” Dorries asks. “What’s it about? The only controversial issue I’ve ever taken up is abortion, and that’s the only hook to hang it on.”Yet it is to be observed that Ms Dorries is neither pro-choice nor pro-life: like the Church of England, she takes a via media on the issue. Which is why she finds it hard to understand why anyone might disagree with her on the question of ‘informed consent’.
The problem is the polarisation of each camp into caricatures: if you’re ‘pro-life’, you’re a frothy-mouth Palin-supporting signed-up member of the bigoted ‘religious right’; if you’re ‘pro-choice’, you’re part of a satan-worshipping death cult, intent on murdering the first-born on the altars of women’s rights and sexual liberty.
And so, as Ms Dorries observes, both sides are ‘ghettoised’ on the issue.
In the world, we bear the consequences of the apotheosis of man. Non-believers do not have comfort or hope. The descent of this debate into tawdry and emotional exchanges of venom is unseemly but only to be expected. It has merely become one of many battles for hegemony in a society of relative values and perverted ideals, where fox-hunting is deemed more evil than abortion, where Christians are mocked and where Muslims are tyrants and where pragmatism tops truth.
But there is one aspect of Ed West’s article which both saddened and surprised His Grace: the withdrawal of the churches from supporting Ms Dorries’ pursuit. She says: “I need religious support. It is our core support. I need the churches being more involved, and the churches have been pathetic, pathetic, during the abortion debate in their support for what I was trying to do.
“The Church of England was the worst and the only person in the Catholic Church who made any comment was Cardinal O’Brien. Everybody was silent because the churches were weak and cowardly in their position.
“I was even told by one envoy from the Church (of England) that Psalm 139 was ‘just poetry’. Weeks later they timidly came out and squeaked their words of support, which were no use to me at this point. The churches have really angered me during this debate.”
It was in this context that His Grace sent Ms Dorries a message of encouragement, and she tweeted the response which hangs in His Grace’s ‘citation’ column:
“His Grace is of course unlike any other and had he been alive today, the situation would have been very different.”Indeed it would have been. For either in the pulpit, on the green benches or in the Upper House, His Grace would stand ashes-to-shoulder with Nadine Dorries in this pursuit. There is no greater evil in contemporary society than the systematic murder of our unborn, with the complicity of Parliament, assent of the Monarch and complacency of the Church.
It comes as no surprise that the Church of England ‘was the worst’. Ms Dorries identifies the cause: 'The Liberal Synod contains many cowards who focus on the "hip" issue of the day and not what is relevant to congregations.'
But where was the Evangelical support? Why was Cardinal O’Brien the only person in the Roman Catholic Church to support Ms Dorries?
Do these churches find Ms Dorries somehow unacceptable? Are they awaiting a sinless and blameless saint to make the same legislative proposals?
If the aggressively secularing trend continues to inhibit expressions of Christian orthodoxy in political debate and marginalise Christians from the public sphere, they will be waiting for quite some time, if not forever.
And while they wait, we will continue to set up our detestable idols in the house that bears His Name, and defiled it. We will build the high places of Topheth in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to burn our sons and daughters in the fire…
We have become a ‘stiff-necked’ people who will not listen to God's words. We have forsaken God to serve other gods even to the extent that we would sacrifice our own children, spilling 'the blood of the innocent’.
Mannaseh's grandson Josiah tried to bring about reformation among the Israelites. After renewing the Covenant between God and His people, Josiah ‘desecrated Topheth which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to make his son or daughter pass through the fire to Molech’ (2Kgs 23:10).
The State may need another Churchill.
The Church may need another Luther.
Parliament may need another Wilberforce.
But the unborn cry out for a Josiah.
