Who is left to speak for the unborn?

Seldom have the prospects for the unborn been bleaker across the English-speaking world than at present. Over the past 13 years, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction – particularly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom – ever-more depraved abortion practices have been made law.

The United States managed to defy this downward trend during the one-term presidency of the pro-life Donald Trump. Now, however, with the pro-abortion Joe Biden occupying the White House, any hopes for alleviating the plight of America's vulnerable unborn have been dashed. The English-speaking democracies appear to have succumbed to what the late Pope John Paul II aptly called the Culture of Death.

The great curtain-raiser for this new intensified offensive against the unborn was the passing in 2008, by the Victorian state parliament, of the most permissive and depraved abortion laws anywhere in the world outside communist China. The new laws allowed babies to be aborted at any time during pregnancy up to full-term. Each year, their plight is commemorated by Melbourne's March for the Babies.

Another retrograde provision of Victoria's 2008 legislation was the high-handed treatment of doctors who have a conscientious objection to abortion. If a pregnant woman requests an abortion from a pro-life doctor, that doctor is forced by law to refer her to another doctor willing to grant her an abortion. In this way, the state has overruled a doctor's professional independence and conscience rights whenever these come into conflict with the killing of the unborn.

Like toppling dominoes, two other Labor-governed states in Australia have followed Victoria in the race to the bottom. In 2013, Tasmania enacted abortion laws that exactly duplicated Victoria's. However, the Apple Isle added specially-designated "exclusion zones" around abortion facilities in order to prevent pro-life advocates from being able to pray, hold silent vigils or offer help and counsel to distressed women seeking abortions. (Tasmania's innovation was eagerly copied by Victoria's parliament.)

In 2018, the Queensland parliament, under its Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, enacted its own permissive abortion laws. New Zealand's Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party, despite the slight difference of the spellings of their respective party names, are united on one issue: promoting the killing of the unborn. In September 2017, NZ's Labour Party came to power with the the support of the Greens and New Zealand First. Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, 37, became the world's youngest female head of government and enjoyed huge public popularity.

In June 2018, she became the world's second elected head of government to give birth while in office (after Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto) when her daughter Neve was born. Her government introduced a new Families Package, including parental leave, which further enhanced her appeal.

Throughout all this, however, she was, and remains, unswervingly faithful to NZ Labour's hardline feminist agenda. She dutifully executed a well-prepared strategy to liberalise her country's abortion laws. New legislation to this effect was duly passed in March 2020.

Should pro-life Christians automatically cast their votes for the conservative alternative? To what end?

In recent years, state Liberal parties across Australia have all too readily assimilated Labor's pro-abortion mentality. In 2019, the New South Wales Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian succeeded in liberalising her state's abortion laws.

Worse by far has been what occurred in South Australia in February this year when Victoria-style abortion-to-birth legislation was passed by the state parliament. The original bill was co-sponsored by Liberal Attorney-General Vickie Chapman with a Greens MP, and enjoyed the full support of Liberal Premier Steven Marshall.

Britain's Conservatives, under the popular Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have behaved no better. In March 2020, the Tory government imposed on Northern Ireland a permissive, extreme and inhumane abortion regime that had been opposed by 79 per cent of local respondents polled. This was after Johnson had promised that the question of abortion laws in Northern Ireland was "for the people of Northern Ireland and their politicians".

Britain's Conservative Party today has little in common with its supposed counterpart, the U.S. Republican Party which for decades has upheld pro-life values.

Donald Trump, during his four years in the White House, was the most pro-life President that America has ever had. He appointed conservatives to the Supreme Court and federal courts, cut American funding for overseas abortions, and appointed pro-life U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations. In 2019, he delivered a powerful presidential message on behalf of the unborn during Down Syndrome Awareness Month.

Has any other conservative party leader in the Englishspeaking world done anything remotely similar?

Two Australia parliamentarians – Western Australian state upper-house Liberal MP Nick Goiran and Queensland federal Liberal National MP George Christensen – in recent years have both campaigned to give medical protection to babies born alive who survive an abortion. If this was ever adopted, it would at least be a small step in the right direction.

The terrible reality today's pro-life advocates face is that our enemies are everywhere emboldened to enact the most farreaching, extreme and inhumane measures against the unborn. By contrast, the most we ever seem to do is plead with our conservative parties to grant us at least some small concession – but, so far, with no result.

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