One of the speeches this year in Parliament Square was from March for Life UK co-director Isabel Vaughan-Spruce. Isabel and her colleague Ben Thatcher have been running March for Life (along with Ben’s wife Sarah) but this month have left their other jobs to give themselves full-time to the pro-life mission.
The speech by Isabel began by telling pro-lifers that for too long we have been tolerating abortion. She explained that ‘when something so objectively wrong as facilitating a mother in the killing of her own child is enshrined in law – we have a duty not to tolerate this. Abortion can never be tolerated’.
The March for Life UK director illustrated her point by explaining ‘What sort of a nation are we that when a woman or a couple are in a crisis pregnancy situation, our solution which we offer is to kill their own child, telling them that this will solve their problems – this IS the problem. In a crisis pregnancy situation the biggest crisis is that abortion is even presented as a viable option’.
Those present were then prompted to think of the reality of what abortion really is; ‘As a nation we need to get back to the idea that killing little children, by anyone, at any stage, in any way, for any reason, is barbaric – and we cannot be a bystander to this’. Isabel continued by expanding the issue to mothers as well as babies ‘People think pro-lifers are opposed to abortion because they only care about the babies – yes we care about babies and I make no apologies for that’ she said ‘But I can tell you this now – the damage that abortion inflicts on women alone is enough to make me pro-life’.
Isabel then particularly highlighted DIY/home abortions and how the abortion industry is trying to ‘push more women away from the abortion centres altogether and instead send the pills out to them at home so the abortion happens in the isolation of their own bedrooms and bathrooms, leaving women or teenage girls to manage their own abortion and dispose of their own dead child’. There followed a call to those who have been through abortions or been involved in abortion work to speak up and break the silence to help change the rhetoric and lies from the abortion industry ‘who for 54 years have been telling women that killing little children is a necessary and acceptable way of solving a crisis pregnancy’.
The crowd were reminded that the problems isn’t just the tragedy of abortion itself but the fact that ‘we have hundreds and thousands of bystanders to this barbaric practice’. Finally Isabel brought her talk to a close by pondering aloud how ‘in years to come, when people look back with clarity on this Number One Issue, the greatest human rights violation of all time and they ask “How could there be so many bystanders?” Let no-one be able to say that among those bystanders was you or me’.
