Many years from now... Abortion and the long term perspective.

Charles Moore writes in the Telegraph on the occasion of 40 years since the abortion act was passed.

"I found myself wondering how abortion will be viewed by museum curators, teachers, historians and moralists 200 years from now."

"We reserve particular scorn for those who sought to justify slavery on moral grounds. We look at the moral blindness of the past, and tut-tut, rather complacently."

"It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them."

He then warns about the danger of senationalising the past, and stresses the need to help mothers with unwanted children rather than jump to preachy condemnation. After that he continues

"But the reason I throw this argument into the future is that, with the passage of time, abortion, especially late abortion, is slowly coming to be seen as a "solution" dating from an era that is passing. It will therefore be discredited."

"If you want to do people wrong, you must first undermine the idea that they are people... One of the good moral trends of our time has been to reject this way of looking at things. Instead, we insist, in the great debate about what it means to be human, that weakness is not a disqualification, but, by a famous Christian paradox, a strength. Abortion runs against this trend, and so civilisation will eventually reject it, as once it rejected slavery."

I for one hope that future generations will look back at this period of our history in disbelief at the unwanted, defenceless, aborted unborn. And I hope that a significant part of the reason is that Christians have left the ghetto and reclaimed the public square for the Lord Jesus Christ, seeking bring his just, loving, serving, compassionate leadership to our society. (Here for more)