International pro-life leader gives SPUC grounds for hope Derby, Sunday 6 September - Legalised abortion contains the seeds of its own destruction, according to the president of the International Right to Life Federation.
Dr Jack Willke head of the Life Issues Institute, Ohio, gave this optimistic message to the annual national conference of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) this weekend.
Dr Willke said that women who had had abortions were now mothers and were advising their daughters not to make the same mistake that they had made.
Young women were noticing that other girls who had abortions were badly affected by the experience.
Arguments which had been initially deployed to legalise abortion were no longer effective.
Nowadays, when abortion supporters said that unborn children were not babies, many people were appalled and thought of images from prenatal scans.
There was no relationship between how mothers felt towards their unborn children and how they treated them after birth, which undermined the argument that unwanted babies should be aborted. Dr Willke said that the number of illegal abortions had been wildly exaggerated by abortion supporters.
There was no evidence that the tightening of Poland's abortion law had led to illegal abortion.
Maternal mortality was a bigger problem in countries with a high abortion rate.
The overpopulation argument had also been undermined by the way in which many countries with legal abortion had birth rates which were below replacement levels.
The issue was no longer just a Catholic one, with Muslims and Evangelicals also opposing abortion.
Dr Willke pointed out that, in America, the number of pro-life pregnancy help centres had grown immensely.
He had found that few women wanted to speak out positively about their abortion experience.
Women were actually increasingly prepared to say why they regretted their abortions.
To the original pro-life argument that abortion kills babies could be added the argument that abortion hurts women.
It also hurt men, who increasingly sought support after abortion.
Pro-life people were having more children than abortion supporters which was changing the nature of public opinion.
American pro-life activists were fighting abortion by getting states to restrict it through regulation.
While Dr Willke did not think he would live to see a change in abortion law, he thought his children would.
He told the conference: "We must keep doing what we're doing. It's slow but we shall win in the end." One could not lose the argument when one advanced the case that abortion killed babies.