The British Royal College of Gynecologists (RCOG) just voted to decriminalize abortions– all abortions– up until birth.  If these doctors had their way, late-term babies that are viable outside the womb would be unprotected.

The RCOG has 14,000 members, but only 33 were allowed to vote on the issue.  The group’s president, Professor Lesley Regan, said last week that the criminal sanctions on abortions should be lifted and compared getting an abortion to getting one’s bunions sorted.  Because that’s totally the same… except that one involves another human life.  A group of 650 doctors called Regan out for such an outrageous comparison, and Dr. John Etherton warned that removing such sanctions opens the door to a dangerous possibility:

It sounds very benign to say let’s decriminalise a procedure, it sounds acceptable, but the immediate implications are that it opens the gate for infanticide.

If a society cannot respect life, then it has no business claiming it respects anything else.  There is nothing else so fundamentally important if a group claims to believe in the value and dignity of human life.  This occurring with our European neighbors does little to diminish the threat of it occurring here at home as well, even though the percentage of Americans who identify as pro-life is increasing.  Just to our north, the government in Nova Scotia is making abortion pills free at pharmacies.  Free– no physician or surgery required– and the pill can terminate a pregnancy of up to 7 weeks.

The British pro-life group Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has already spoken out against the RCOG’s vote, and is working to change Britain’s current abortion laws from a ban at 24 weeks to a ban at 20 weeks, since babies are now surviving outside the womb at earlier stages.  Dr. Anthony McCarthy pointed out that many women often grieve their babies for years, and are troubled by the speed with which abortion providers offer to terminate pregnancies, rarely presenting any alternatives.

The RCOG’s vote places pressure on the government to alter the country’s abortion laws, especially since they aren’t the first group to voice such an opinion: the Royal College of Midwives and the British Medical Association have already passed similar votes in favor of legalizing abortion throughout pregnancy.  It’s wrong, it’s reprehensible, and anyone who says otherwise ought to think long and hard about the grotesque nature of what they’re accepting.