A prominent institution that provided clear thinking on abortion and assisted suicide has closed just as the United Kingdom is careening toward madness on such issues.

Y ou probably haven’t heard of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre. An academic institution based in Oxford, England, the Centre had provided an invaluable perspective on bioethics issues — abortion, stem cells, assisted suicide, and more — for the British population.

You are now even less likely to have heard of it, if you hadn’t already. That’s because this past summer, it closed. Its probable obscurity to Americans, and perhaps even to Britons, did not make its work any less important. In fact, there’s a strong case that its perspective is needed now more than ever, as the United Kingdom is careening toward madness on the issues in which it specialized.

The Anscombe Bioethics Centre began life in 1977 as the Linacre Centre for Health Care Ethics. The name change came in 2010, upon its move to Oxford. Its namesake, appropriately for a Catholic institution funded by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, was the British academic Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe was an influential analytic philosopher and Catholic who (among other accomplishments) revived virtue ethics, humbled C. S. Lewis, and had seven children.

It is too often a depressing feature of political life in the United Kingdom that moral issues that occasion intense controversy and debate here are deliberated with a worrying sedateness over there. It is one thing — and a good thing — to be civil. It is another thing entirely to let fundamental questions about human nature and how we ought to live proceed along as though they were mere workaday fiscal concerns.

This unfortunate characteristic, combined with British culture’s rapid — and perhaps accelerating — abandonment of its foundations, accounts for the fact that the Centre has lost many of its struggles (for now). David Albert Jones, its director, identifies its failed campaign against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 as one example. The Act liberalized abortion laws in the U.K. and established a modern regime of regulations for fertility — thereby instantiating into law such ethically worrying practices as the storage of and research on human embryos.

This is not reason to think that the Centre’s work was a waste of time or resources. Jones certainly does not think so. He told the Catholic Herald that, even amid such defeats, he and his colleagues “maintained a witness to the dignity of human life from conception to natural death” through conferences, media, and research. Their work was also cited in Parliament and provided guidance for those who deal with ethical issues. David Alton, a Catholic member of the House of Lords, told OSV News that the Centre “has been an invaluable resource in providing sound, coherent analysis of ethical dilemmas which confront legislators on an almost daily basis.”

So what caused the closure of an institution doing such important work? As with a dispiriting number of worthy projects, Covid-19 helped push the Anscombe Centre to a point of financial unviability. This, even as the organization was providing important analysis of lockdowns and vaccine mandates from a measured bioethical perspective. Would that it had gotten more attention than overhyped alarmism from the likes of Imperial College’s now-discredited Neil Ferguson, a thoroughgoing lockdown advocate.

But Covid-19 is hardly the only issue the Anscombe Centre has had to confront. The U.K. in 2025 is on the precipice of a bioethical dystopia. Earlier this year, Parliament voted to decriminalize abortion at any stage. Already, before the vote, nearly a third of conceptions in England and Wales ended in abortion. Abortion has claimed some 10 million lives in the U.K. since 1967. And, again, all with nothing like the intense debate — and pushback — of the sort we have had in this country.

The last major topic to which the Anscombe Centre devoted its work was the ongoing debate on “assisted dying.” Or, as former Prime Minister Theresa May more aptly described it in a speech against a bill that would allow the practice, assisted suicide. “Suicide is wrong,” May said. “But this bill effectively says suicide is okay. What message does that give to our society?” Should the bill ultimately pass, the familiar pattern of Canada and elsewhere, where coerced killing of the elderly and other infirm becomes the norm, will likely follow. And Catholic hospices and other forms of elder care may face closure for being unwilling to comply with government rules.

All is not lost for the Anscombe Centre, however. Its work, including on assisted suicide, still lives on its website, and in the public domain. The Catholic tradition that informed its perspective is still available to anyone who wishes to consult it. And in a land that, in recent years, has tended away from faith, it is now Catholicism to which the young are increasingly turning.

The near-term future of the U.K. looks grim. The Anscombe Centre has seen its perspective defeated and has itself shuttered. But if there is hope for the future, it lies in the eternal, life-giving verities that informed the center’s work. Such truths can outlast temporary defeats, so long as there are those still willing to maintain them. As a man to whom both America and England can lay claim once said, “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory.” Should these victories come, you can be sure that, by then, you won’t be the only one to have heard of the Anscombe Centre.