In a move that has stunned many across the UK and beyond, British lawmakers have voted to decriminalize abortion up until birth in England and Wales. The amendment–tabled by Labour MP Dame Diana Johnson and passed on June 17, 2025–sweeps away longstanding legal protections for unborn children, removing criminal penalties for abortions performed at any point in pregnancy.

This radical shift marks one of the most extreme abortion policies in the Western world. It means that a healthy baby, viable and capable of surviving outside the womb, can now legally be aborted for any reason–including social or economic circumstances–right up to the moment of birth. 

The law dismantles Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, effectively stripping away the last legal safeguard that had treated abortion as a matter of criminal justice unless justified under specific medical grounds.

This is about the deliberate ending of a child’s life at full term, days or even hours before delivery. It is not healthcare. It is not compassion. It is barbarism.

The End of Preborn Protection

Pro-life MPs and advocacy groups had fought desperately to block the amendment, warning that it would pave the way for “abortion on demand” with virtually no accountability. Conservative MP Carla Lockhart called it “the most extreme abortion law in the United Kingdom’s history,” noting that no other legislation in Europe permits such late-term abortions for any reason. Even some pro-choice advocates expressed discomfort with the sheer breadth of the decriminalization.

But their voices were drowned out in the rush toward “bodily autonomy,” the secular idol of our age. In a stunning betrayal of the most vulnerable, Parliament chose to prioritize convenience over conscience, ideology over innocence.

A Biblical Tragedy

From a biblical standpoint, the moral weight of this decision cannot be overstated. Scripture teaches unequivocally that life begins in the womb. Psalm 139 declares: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Jeremiah 1:5 echoes God’s intimate involvement with human life before birth: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”

To decriminalize abortion up until birth is to declare that God’s handiwork can be discarded at will. It is to deny the Creator’s image in the preborn child. It is to treat the sacred as disposable. And in doing so, the UK has chosen to enshrine not just permissiveness, but perversion of moral truth, into law.

This isn’t merely a legal change–it is a spiritual earthquake.

A Nation at a Crossroads

Let us be clear: no nation can commit such acts against its own children without consequence. Throughout Scripture, when societies devalue life–especially innocent life–they face judgment. The blood of the unborn cries out, and God hears.

Decriminalizing abortion up to birth sends a chilling message: that the life of a fully developed human child is worth less than the preferences of another. That the strong have the legal right to dispose of the weak. That convenience can override conscience.

History will remember this vote not as progress, but as regression into moral chaos.

A Call to the Church

This is not the time for silence. The Church must respond–not with hatred or political posturing–but with truth, compassion, and courage. We must become louder advocates for life, more radical in our support for vulnerable mothers, more urgent in our prayers for a nation lost in darkness.

The unborn cannot march or protest. They cannot speak for themselves. But we can. We must.

As the culture of death advances under the guise of “choice,” may the people of God be those who choose life. Not just in word, but in action–in care, in advocacy, and in unwavering proclamation of the truth: every life is sacred, from conception to final breath.

Let this be the day we mourn–but also the day we rise. The light still shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

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