(LifeSiteNews) — On June 17, 2025, the Parliament of the United Kingdom decriminalized abortion up until birth with an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, prompting widespread shock and outrage, even from typically “pro-choice” persons. The impact of this legislation needs unpacking.
In 2021, a preemie baby survived after being born at 21 weeks and one day. In 2023, a baby survived in the U.K. after being born at 22 weeks. Those same babies, if unwanted, can now be killed without compunction or legal consequence with pills, suction aspirators, and forceps.
In other words, the U.K. has accepted two competing realities. Babies in the womb are babies and can survive outside the womb weeks before the technical (but now essentially defunct) abortion limit of 24 weeks.
READ: UK votes to decriminalize abortion
This moral schizophrenia is total. Those advocating for the decriminalization of abortion specifically or celebrating legal abortion in general know these things but refuse to publicly acknowledge them. Parliamentarians simply ignored the fact that while they decriminalized feticide until birth in the House of Commons, medical professionals were fighting for the lives of preemie babies in medical hospitals across the country.
The postmodern individual, in their view, must hold the awful power of life and death over the smallest children, and their whim is all that stands between them and an excruciating, gruesome demise.
This schizophrenia became starker when, earlier this month, the U.K.’s Labour government announced another policy priority. According to the Guardian:
Parents in Britain will be granted the right to bereavement leave after suffering a miscarriage as part of Labour’s changes to workers’ rights, it has been confirmed. In a change to the law made via amendments to the employment rights bill, mothers and their partners will be given the legal right to at least one week’s bereavement leave if they have suffered a pregnancy loss before 24 weeks’ gestation … Parents are already entitled to up to two weeks of bereavement leave if they experience a stillbirth after 24 weeks of pregnancy or a child dies before they turn 18.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who voted to decriminalize abortion until birth, stated that this new policy would allow people to have time off work to grieve the loss of their pre-born child; the exact amount of time will be specified in later legislation. The CEO of the Miscarriage Association, Vicki Robinson, called the move “a hugely important step that acknowledges the often very significant impact of pre-24 week loss, not only for those experiencing the physical loss, but for their partners, too.”
In other words, it is hard for mothers and fathers to lose babies, and the government will take steps to further recognize that loss – because the “physical loss” Robinson obliquely refers to is, in fact, that of a child, not a clump of cells. The government is inferring this, if not stating it outright.
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The change was spearheaded by Labour MP Sarah Owen, who also voted to decriminalize abortion up until birth. The women and equalities select committee “concluded in a report in January that the case for it was overwhelming” – the bereavement leave, that is, not abortion. According to the Guardian:
A number of employers already offer the leave as an extra benefit, but the committee said it should become a universal right given the physical and emotional impacts of baby loss. About 250,000 expectant mothers in the UK suffer a miscarriage every year. Between 10% and 20% of pregnancies end in an early miscarriage within the first 12 weeks of gestation.
Notice the language: “emotional impacts of baby loss.” The Guardian, which championed abortion decriminalization, even hyperlinked the phrase to a powerful personal miscarriage story.
It is tempting to merely highlight the hypocrisy, but the reality is that these people know what they are doing – and that is a far more chilling truth. Sarah Owen and her colleagues knew when they voted to decriminalize abortion that they were voting for babies to be killed. They knew that many of these babies could, if given the chance, survive outside the womb. They knew their own rhetoric was false, and they used it anyway – for the most insidious of purposes.
They knew all of this, and they did it anyways.
