Culture of death seizes ground in Britain

In just one week, the British Parliament dealt two major blows to the dignity of human life. On June 17, the House of Commons voted 379–137 to decriminalize abortion up to the point of birth—removing criminal penalties for women who obtain an abortion at any stage. Three days later, those same lawmakers advanced a bill to legalize assisted suicide, letting doctors dispense lethal drugs to patients who are deemed to have less than six months to live.

These twin bills reflect a tragic moral collapse. The United Kingdom is now sending a chilling message that some lives simply aren’t worth protecting.

The vote to decriminalize abortion came after a mere two hours of debate. While U.K. law would continue to bar doctors from performing abortions after 24 weeks, with broad exceptions permitted, this amendment would remove a critical legal backstop that has protected fully developed babies for well over a century.

Proponents framed this move as compassionate—a shield against the prosecution of vulnerable women. But that is a smokescreen to obscure what the public knows is wrong. Polling shows that only 1% of Brits support abortion up until birth. What this amendment does is remove safeguards against dangerous, late-term, self-administered abortions—telling women they are on their own, even in their most desperate moments.

The assisted suicide bill is predicated on the same egregious disregard for human life masked as compassion. While its supporters promise strict limits on the practice, such promises almost always mark the beginning of assisted death, only to lead to egregious expansions down the road.

In Canada, for instance, assisted suicide was legalized less than a decade ago. Now, at least as of 2023, nearly 1 in 20 Canadian deaths are state-facilitated. And that number is growing. Disabled and elderly people report being steered toward death when what they really need is support to live. Once death is framed as a form of care, it becomes easier—and cheaper—for a nation to offer death to its citizens as the default.

This latest advance by the culture of death comes as pro-life voices are being marginalized across the West. In the United Kingdom, Livia Tossici-Bolt and Adam Smith-Connor have been criminally convicted for offering consensual conversation and even silently praying in abortion facility “buffer zones”—drawing the rightful ire of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance earlier this year.

In the United States, we have made critical strides for the unborn, particularly in reversing Roe v. Wade and in the recent Supreme Court ruling that allows states to defund Planned Parenthood. Yet, even in the United States, state officials have gone after pro-life pregnancy centers—including in New Jersey, where the attorney general targeted a pregnancy center with an invasive, unconstitutional subpoena seeking to expose its donors. That case, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, will be heard at the U.S. Supreme Court this fall. It’s no mistake that officials who justify killing the unborn would seek to silence those who expose it.

Both the United Kingdom’s abortion and assisted suicide measures parade as expansions of personal freedom, but they are nothing more than abandonment disguised as autonomy. When the law declares a 35-week-old baby unworthy of protection or offers lethal drugs to the suffering instead of care, it communicates that the right to life is no longer inherent, but conditional—granted only to those seen as healthy, wanted, or useful. Yet we know that the right to life is innate and God-given, and that real compassion does not end a life. Compassion enters into suffering and seeks to alleviate it—never by killing.

Both measures now move to the House of Lords, where lawmakers have the opportunity to subject them to deeper scrutiny. Many in that chamber have pledged to amend or oppose the assisted suicide bill. Meanwhile, the abortion amendment—passed as part of the broader Crime and Policing Bill—cannot be vetoed outright, but it can still be delayed or challenged through further debate and revision. In both cases, the Lords must ask the hard questions that the Commons ignored.

While the prognosis for both bills is grim, what’s clear is that Christians must become the first responders in a society that has lost sight of God-given human dignity. That means supporting perinatal hospice care, standing with mothers in crisis, comforting the dying, and defending the disabled. It means telling a different story—one that proclaims that every life is a gift, that no one is beyond the reach of love, and that suffering, while real, is never a reason to discard a person fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image.

Britain has taken a step toward the shadows, but the Church must be a light. A society that values life must have the courage to say no to death. And we must all have the conviction to say yes to life, at every stage and in every circumstance.