Antonia Tully, blogpost

So here we are, in the grip of a global pandemic, with every news bulletin focused on measures to prevent people dying from Covid-19, yet at the same time Boris Johnson’s government has sanctioned DIY at home abortions. 109, 836 unborn babies in England and Wales were killed by abortion between January and June 2020, up 4,296 on the same period in 2019, with medical abortions accounting for 82%. So-called “medical” abortions are those where the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol are used to end the baby’s life. Under the DIY “pills through the post” policy, women perform their own medical abortion, and take both these dangerous drugs at home with no supervision. 

It makes me wonder what Mr Johnson really thinks about the value of human beings. Back in 2007, he stated that “real number one issue” which politicians must tackle is to stop people being born in the first place. And I am not aware that he has said anything to refute this.

Poor Boris, it seems, was aghast at the number of people in the world. He recalled decades of travel, which has left him with this view of the world’s population. He could smell over-population in the “traffic jams of the Middle East”. Flying over Africa at night and seeing fires burning away scrubland to make room for more human beings, along with satellite pictures of Europe by night showing lights everywhere, told Boris that the world is over-populated.  Seeing Mexico at night displaying “a vast checkerboard of smog-bound, low-rise dwellings stretching from one horizon to another”, was further proof that there were too many people in the world.

 I, on the other hand, have often walked eight-miles or more with my husband and dog, across fields, through woodland, up gently inclining hills and down into valleys and not pass another human being at all. All within the M25.

So who’s impression of whether the world is over-populated is the right one? Actually, mine is.

Last year researchers at the University of Washington’s Health Metrics and Evaluation reported on the numbers of people in the world and revealed that the real problem is that the populations of many countries are shrinking not growing.

In the words of Steve Mosher, president of the pro-life Population Research Institute, the findings from the University of Washington are “eye-popping”. Researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC that the results of the study were “jaw-dropping”. My colleague at SPUC commenting on the BBC report last year asked: “Can we finally drop the over-population mantra?” I suspect the answer to that question in certain quarters is no.

Headlines from the study published in The Lancet include: By 2100, projected fertility rates in 183 of 195 countries will not be high enough to maintain current populations without liberal immigration policies. The world’s population is forecast to peak in 2064 at around 9.7 billion people and fall to 8.8 billion by century’s end, with 23 countries seeing populations shrink by more than 50%, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Spain. And there will be dramatic declines in working age-populations in countries such as India and China, with consequences, among others, for economic growth.

Interestingly the authors of the study are anxious to warn that there must be no compromise on reproductive health (i.e. abortion and contraception). I expect that’s because the study was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates. 

Back in 2007 Boris was worried that according to the UN there will be 9.2 billion people in the world by 2050. “I simply cannot understand,” he said, “why no one discusses this impending calamity.”

The real “impending calamity” is that too few babies are being born, not too many. Many countries are contracepting and aborting their population to the point of no return. Steve Mosher explains: “Any fertility rate above 2.1 means the population will keep growing. Any fertility rate below that level means that the population will be shrinking over time.

“This is already the case in dozens of countries around the world, where for a generation or more couples have been averaging fewer than two children. Italian women, for instance, are averaging only 1.33 children. This means that — barring a huge uptick in Italian fertility — the Italians won’t be around for much longer, at least in any numbers.”

Babies are good for the world. People are a country’s greatest asset. The pro-life movement has been proclaiming this for decades.

Maybe it’s not surprising that DIY abortion has been introduced on Boris’s watch. Back in 2007 he declared that as he flies around the world he sees “a horrifying vision of habitations multiplying and replicating like bacilli in a Petri dish.”

Boris’s “vision” in 2007 was that babies are nothing more than germs.

And in 2020, he turned that vision into reality by authorising abortion at home which has significantly increased the number of babies killed before birth.

The “real number one issue”, then and now, Boris, is your inhumane attitude to human beings.