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In today’s cultural climate where morality is based on feelings, I am rarely shocked
when the cognitive dissonance of our leaders is exposed. Still, I was taken aback by an announcement from the government that they intend to amend the Employment Rights Bill, giving parents the legal right to take time off work to grieve if they experience pregnancy loss at any stage. This would extend statutory bereavement leave to parents who experience miscarriage even before 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Currently, such leave is only available to parents who lose their unborn child after 24
weeks. At the time of writing, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said the change will “give people time away from work to grieve” and added “no one who is going through the heartbreak of pregnancy loss should have to go back to work before they are ready.
Parents can currently claim up to a fortnight of leave if they suffer pregnancy loss after 24 weeks, or if a child younger than 18 dies.
We are glad that this proposal recognises the profound grief that women and families endure after pregnancy loss, but it’s glaringly obvious that a significant inconsistency with current and pending abortion law has been thrown up. It is downright hypocritical for the government to acknowledge the emotional devastation caused by losing a baby before 24 weeks, whilst continuing not just to permit, but to sanction abortion to the same gestational age and even up to birth due to abortion decriminalisation.
Let’s not forget that the main flag-bearer of this new policy was Angela Rayner. She is the epitome of the jumbled rhetoric around life in utero that we see in Western society. Before she was a minister, she voted consistently in favour of decriminalisation, abortion in Northern Ireland, and pills-by-post, yet she speaks with a perfectly understandable delight about her own struggles with teenage pregnancy, and the love she has for her now 28-year-old son; even saying that “he saved her” because she “had a little one to look after”. So, Angela Rayner appears to believe that parents should have time to grieve children who are worthy of love and emotion – but only some of them? Not the ones who will be caught up in the violence of late term abortion.
Let’s simplify it: how can the loss of a child at 20 or 23 weeks gestation be considered worthy of statutory bereavement leave, whilst at the same time, a child of identical gestational age can be intentionally aborted without legal or moral concern?
That is the philosophical inconsistency. In cases of miscarriage, if the unborn child is acknowledged as a real loss which is worthy of grief, then that same life must also hold intrinsic value in all circumstances, not only when its loss is unintentional.
So, in granting people “time away from work to grieve” – what does that mean? It is an admission that there is worth and value in that unborn life, something of sufficient importance to warrant grief. But if the death of an unborn child before 24 weeks is mournful, what does that make abortion?
The truth is that grief does not derive solely from the desires of the parents. It flows from the reality that something has been lost: a living human being.
The scientific reality is that by 10 weeks gestation, the unborn child has fingers, toes, organs, and brain activity – every part of their body is developed. After the unborn child has developed these components, they simply need time to grow. By 20 weeks gestation many unborn children respond to stimuli and are effectively viable.
It is easy to spot the moral inconsistency.
The extension of bereavement leave completely reinforces the pro-life position: Life in the womb is life – not because of the mother’s willingness to accept it, but because of the undeniable existence of the child. If a miscarriage at 10 weeks can bring profound and legitimate sorrow, how can society simultaneously regard the intentional ending of a life at the same stage as morally insignificant?
SPUC continues in its call for ethical consistency. It would fix so much. Either we acknowledge the unborn child as a human life worthy of mourning and protection, or we walk the path towards reducing human value to the circumstances of one’s conception. The government has unintentionally exposed the rank hypocrisy at the heart of all legislation about babies and pregnancy – when an unborn child is wanted and lost, we mourn, but when it is unwanted and killed we run into the arms of the fiction that he or she never existed.
Pro-lifers support the government’s position. When will they start to realise ours?
