Impossible to imagine. . .

I read not long ago that almost one in three pregnancies in the U.K. now ends in abortion.  Let me say that again.  One third of all pregnancies are ended.  Some 300,000 a year.  What is even more alarming is that the rationale for all of these aborted babies is not strictly economics but the growing numbers of women in the U.K. who cannot imagine themselves to be moms.  In other words, the pressure is not external but internal.  Along with the obvious lack of respect for the sacredness of life and the casual way that women have chosen to kill the child within their bodies before it becomes too big to notice, there is this.  These women cannot imagine themselves to be moms -- there is no longer any aspiration to be or joy in the prospect of motherhood.  It has become something dreary and dreaded.  When did that all happen?

That is, of course, one of the reasons why immigration is important in the U.K. and throughout Europe.  The birth rate of the population is dismally small and certainly not enough to replace those who are there so the immigrants are essential both to the economy and to the health of the society.  The urgency for children has been eased by the more elite ideas of a global village and the exchange of children from the places where the elites presumed them to be overcrowding to the places where they are needed.  In 2023, when there were nearly 300,000 abortions, there were just 591,072 live births were recorded in England and Wales. The birth rate gap has been plugged by immigration. It is a shocking.  Since 1968 there were 10.9 million abortions in the U.K. who were replaced by 10.7 million immigrants to the U.K.  In other words, the U.K. does not need women to become moms and the women seem glad to accommodate this lack of need.  

We all know that marriage has become an unpleasant and increasingly unwelcome responsibility which can easily be ignored by women who do not want to be wives and moms and by men who do not think they are needed to be husbands and dads.  That is the bigger factor behind the U.K. statistics.  In the space of a few generations what was once the social structure that under girded every institution and aspect of ordinary life has become something unnecessary and undesired.  In the same space of time, abortions become routine and normal but something else became exceptional and odd.  That is even larger than the terrible and tragic numbers of abortions in the U.K. and something that cannot be fixed by legislation, tax benefits, or even subsidy.  Think of the homes in which the children who are being born are growing up and what they are learning.  Think of the good lessons and examples lost and the wrong lessons and examples being passed down not simply to the children but to the generations to follow.  Think of how the decline of Christianity in the same period has helped to fuel the fires of destruction that have literally undone all about marriage and family and children which previous generations had passed down -- at least until the 1970s and beyond.

Oddly enough, the largest abortion provider in the U.K. is actually called the British Pregnancy Advisory Service!  Like the American industrial provider of the same, Planned Parenthood, it is clear that pregnancy and parenthood are the last things on the minds of these agencies and the women who use them.  Along with this, the ethical dimensions of both abortion and marriage/family have been pushed to the side of things while other things have taken central place.  What was designed to be exceptional has become normal and what was designed (at least by God) to be normal has become exceptional.  That is how far things have come for our special friends across the sea and the trend is unmistakable both in Canada our neighbor to the north and the more liberal states in the US.