Two votes in the British Parliament this week sent a stark message to the rest of the world: The U.K. government no longer values the lives of its people, and by extension, their liberties.
The House of Commons, the only elected body in Parliament, voted 314-291 on Friday to legalize state-assisted suicide for terminally ill adults who have been told they have less than six months to live. The vote came just three days after members approved an amendment, by a vote of 370 to 137, to allow women to abort their unborn babies at any point in pregnancy, up to birth. The unelected House of Lords will have an opportunity to amend each bill, but, as The New York Times noted of the former, “the fact that the bill has the support of elected lawmakers means that it is very likely to become law.”
Both decisions are, obviously, sides of the same coin. It’s no surprise that a country willing to kill “unwanted” babies would also be willing to kill “unwanted” adults. Neither is compatible with respect for the innate value of human life, no matter how many “safeguards” members of Parliament claimed would limit the state from killing too many people.
The bill’s opponents warned opening the door to state-assisted suicide would only initiate the trajectory, and that it would incentivize widespread killing of vulnerable people under Britain’s socialist health system. Their concerns were validated by Parliament’s rejection of additional limitations (Dan Hitchens of First Things Magazine compiled dozens of the rejected amendments here last month).
On abortion, the Brits are simply a few decades further ahead. In 1967, British lawmakers legalized abortion up to 28 weeks of gestation, a limit that changed to 24 weeks in 1990. According to the National Health Service, a baby at 24 weeks is considered viable, developed enough to survive outside the womb. He has eyelashes and fingerprints.
That law technically required doctors to find that the pregnancy threatened the physical or mental health of the mother or the baby’s siblings — a broad provision under which, as my colleague Jordan Boyd noted earlier this week, did not stop hundreds of thousands of babies from being aborted every year. A baby could also be aborted, at any point, if he had an allegedly “substantial” chance of a serious mental or physical handicap.
That didn’t go far enough for lawmakers, who voted Tuesday for the amendment that will allow women in England and Wales to undergo abortion at any point in pregnancy and, according to The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, “for any reason, including the sex of the baby.”
Britain’s reckless descent toward unlimited abortion, in the same week lawmakers threw open the door to killing the terminally ill, should signal to everyone how those “safeguards” on state-assisted dying are going to end. So should the example of Canada, Britain’s former colony, where doctors have warned the government approved the deaths of people who sought to die because “they were poor, disabled or socially isolated.”
In 2023, Canada oversaw the assisted suicides of more than 15,000 people, making up for one out of every 20 deaths. Britain’s proposed law is not yet as broad as Canada’s, but it reflects the same lack of respect for any innate value attached to human life.
For hundreds of years, social and political norms in the United Kingdom and the rest of the West have been inseparable from the Christian teaching that humanity is made in the image of God — the imago Dei — and has inherent value as a result. It’s the foundation of the Western principles of equality and, by extension, self-government.
Such a belief motivated Christians in the West, such as William Wilberforce, who entered Parliament in 1780, to push for the abolition of the slave trade and eventually of slavery in the British Empire. It has been the driving force behind the West’s historical disposition toward human flourishing. Because of the imago Dei, we understand liberty as more than the impulsive license of other created beings, as the means by which to live lives of virtue.
As Christian morality has receded in Britain and the West, so have the political freedoms that governments once recognized as flowing from it. It’s not a coincidence that the British government has rejected its citizens’ right to life at the same time it rejects their right to free speech and religious exercise.
Once a nation ceases to respect the source of human dignity, it will soon stop respecting the rights that dignity demands. If the United Kingdom won’t recognize the sanctity of the lives of its most vulnerable, it can no longer be expected to recognize any other liberties.