A dark day in Westminster

On Tuesday, parliament decriminalised full term abortion. You might agree with it. I don't. But either way, we've made a major change to the abortion law, on the basis of no evidence session, no committee stage scrutiny, just 46 minutes of backbench debate, zero public debate, and a government minister wind-up who refused to take any interventions. It wasn't on any manifesto. Everyone should be outraged about that. It underscores the point that representative democracy most definitely is not democracy.

Abortion, though, is one of those issues I'd always been content to leave to other people with stronger opinions on the matter. You don't have to have an opinion on everything. But it's precisely that kind of abnegation that allows extreme ideas to become normalised. We brushed it off as a mundane medical procedure. Something generally undesirable, but something to be made available for those who choose it.

Men, in particular, ceded the territory because it wasn't worth the argument. Too often we take the path of least resistance on moral arguments because it isn't worth the grief, especially when such disagreements can damage, and even end relationships. We have become supine in our defence of moral principles.

Until now I was content with the status quo, not least because it's something that doesn't directly affect me. But if I've read the government's own statistics correctly, assuming there isn't a missing element, the vast majority of abortions are carried out on the grounds of "mental health". I think there is something basically wrong with that when we're talking about 214,256 in a year - especially when "mental health" has become a diagnosis of even mild adversity for which we prescribe SSRIs unnecessarily.

Given the way in which doctors have casually prescribed SSRIs and even puberty blockers, with no medical pushback, I have a hard time believing these numbers of abortions are on legitimate medical grounds. Increasingly, it has become post-facto contraception. We trivialised something with profound societal, psychological and moral consequences. It is too important to be decided exclusively by radical feminists.

This latest amendment to abortion law drives a horse and cart through layers of protections, some of which are as much to protect women against coercion. I cannot even begin to fathom the unintended consequences, which are likely to be monstrous. I can very easily see Muslim women being pressured into terminating baby girls. Full term abortion, for any reason other than to save the mother's life, is objectively evil in my book.

Of particular concern, politically, is that Kemi Badenoch allowed her party a free vote on this. She said it was a matter of conscience. I do wonder what the point of a notionally conservative party is if it cannot take a moral line on this of all issues.

But then I suppose we should thank Stella Creasy for reanimating the issue. Not only must her amendment be reversed, this demonstrates that we need to look again at the overly permissive legislation. Abortion should be a procedure of last resort and only in the most critical circumstances.

I do not believe any woman should have to carry a child if she was raped, nor should they have to carry non-viable pregnancies to term if it can be averted. Terminations should usually only be carried out on genuine medical grounds, and that cannot extend to metal distress or inconvenience, except for where there are established patterns of self-harm or mental vulnerability.

Put simply, I do not believe there is a legitimate reason for hundreds of thousands of terminations annually. Women have the right to choose who they sleep with, but once a human life is created, decision-making exclusivity ends. This is a moral crisis and one that even threatens our survival as a nation.