It is not difficult to imagine. I remember my own amazement learning about the slave trade that had gone on in the 18th and 19th centuries. What was staggering was not just the slave trade itself but the way it was defended even by some who professed to be Christians.
Will a future generation be equally bewildered?
Will they understand why sometimes in the same street you have people who desperately want to adopt children and others who are having their unborn offspring killed in the womb?
Will they be able to comprehend the anguish of a woman in hospital for fertility treatment who finds herself in the bed next to another woman who has just had an abortion?
Will they be able to comprehend the logic of a hospital where there is a desperate struggle to preserve the life of a baby 24 weeks on from conception in one room, while in another they are destroying another just a few weeks younger?
What will they make of gynaecology professor Philip Bennett for instance? He spoke openly last August of how ‘I dismember the foetus, pull it apart limb by limb and remove it piece by piece.’ Here is a man who kills as many babies as he delivers, yet who does not hide in shame but wallows in his butchery by speaking about it to a Sunday newspaper.
What will they make of another senior gynaecologist who declared that he would sack any of his staff who dared to suggest to an expectant mother that she would be better to have her unwanted child adopted rather than aborting it?
Will they not be horrified to learn how, because a woman finds the thought of twins unthinkable, it is perfectly legitimate for a doctor to inject poison into one of the two children in her womb so that one is born whole while the other dies in the womb? It is difficult to think of anything more barbaric.
How will they react to the trivialisation of life that is part of the IVF programme in this country where thousands of embryos are created with no hope of their survival?
Or what about the mass slaughter of thousands that did survive, despite many genuine offers to save the lives of these unborn innocents?
Will they believe it when they learn how abortion is presented as ‘a woman’s right to choose’, yet all the while women who would really like to have children are being pressurised by men into getting rid of their unborn children.
Will they not be utterly staggered that until relatively recently it has been medical practice to assume that an unborn child feels no pain? ‘What was it like back then?’ they will ask, ‘Were they completely ignorant?’
Far more important than what a future generation may say is what God does say. He says,
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.
Rescue those being led away to death
Defend the cause of the weak .... and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
The 19th century slave trade was ended, under God, not only through the work of Wilberforce and other prominent figures but through the work of a host of ordinary men and women who did what they could. By the grace of God, may we also be used so that this barbaric onslaught against the unborn will also soon be brought to an end.
A Grace Magazine editorial from December 1996. Nothing has really changed.
