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Fifty-eight years since the Abortion Act, Britain has quietly broken records for the number of lives ended before birth — with no end in sight.

27 April marked 58 years since the 1967 Abortion Act came into operation in England, Wales and Scotland, although across the governing classes, this tragic date wasn’t marked or even mentioned. This apparent lack of interest might be seen as typical of their approach to the issue, but in fact they are very interested — in making abortion even easier to obtain and ever more prevalent.

A Record Nobody Is Celebrating

Although there are increasing reports of declining birth rates both in the UK and around the world, abortion never seems to surface as a factor, or even as a matter of public concern – uncannily recalling Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that didn’t bark in the night-time”.

But perhaps this strange silence is something to do with the fact that abortions in England and Wales reached a record high of 278,740 in 2023 – an increase of 26,618 from 2022. Overall, the UK saw a record-breaking 299,617.

In yet another first, Scotland registered 18,710 abortions, while in Northern Ireland, the figure rose from 2,795 in 2024 to 2,899 in 2025.

Since 1968 – basing estimates of more recent abortions on earlier figures – Live Action says that to date, “a staggering 11,105,671 unborn babies” have been killed. At current rates, they say, “one baby is lost to abortion every two minutes, 34 lives are ended every hour.”

If such high levels of mortality applied in any other context, it would be seen as a national catastrophe. And yet the attitude of successive governments has been “Move along there; nothing to see.”

Pills by Post: Covid’s Lasting Legacy

Why this stratospheric rise in recent years? It is not difficult to pinpoint the cause: in March 2020, Covid was the pretext for sending abortion pills through the post without face-to-face appointments, thus speeding up what has become a conveyor belt to abortion. Tragically, it sidelines alternative, life-affirming courses of action, not to mention the opportunity to detect possible coercion.

Thanks, Boris. The ‘temporary’ measure introduced during the Covid pandemic has proved to be a permanent feature of our society, albeit one that, unlike other disastrous political moves, has not been subject to scrutiny or even passing comment, despite some women taking the pills much later than the legal limit. Which might have some bearing on the apparent rise in cases of dead ‘newborns’ being abandoned.

But if we are already desensitised to abortion pills causing human remains to be dumped in our water system, why be surprised that more women are treating their own offspring as rubbish?

Rather than reversing their stance, however, and demanding increased protection for mothers and their unborn children, campaigners demand ever-later abortion.

But in so doing, they clash with public opinion: only 1% of the population wants abortion up to birth, while 70% of women support an abortion limit of 20 weeks or less.

Decriminalisation and the Memory Hole

Advocates would see increased numbers of abortions merely as evidence that women can now avoid having children they do not want. This is in line with the myth that legalised abortion was a triumph of feminism. Nothing could be further from the truth, since, as my own research has shown, it was in fact the work of the eugenics/population control movement. Far from a feminist triumph, our high levels of abortion simply illustrate the fact that when governments make it easier to do bad things, we see an increase in evil.

Yet, far from trying to reverse this trend, abortion advocates have supported the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, at least (for now) as regards women self-aborting.

And they have got their wish: this measure is now in force, and in another amendment tacked on to the Labour Government’s Crime and Policing Bill, all women who have been convicted of illegal abortions in England and Wales will be automatically pardoned and their records expunged – as far back as the 1800s.

Their unborn victims are already anonymous – non-persons – but now any record of their fate will be pushed down the ‘memory hole’ of history.

Not content with this “achievement”, the Government is about to raise abortion rates even higher: as part of their (badly misnamed) Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England, they will financially incentivise operators to provide “lunch-hour” or “same day” terminations.

At the same time, they have presided over the prosecution – more accurately, persecution – of those who (even silently) offer last-minute material help and moral support to needy pregnant mothers.

Clearly, it is now legal to kill, but illegal to try to prevent the killing.

The Price We Are Paying

We are paying the price of this pre-birth mass murder in a faltering economy, with commentators warning that our dwindling birth rate will mean a declining amount of taxes being paid into government coffers to provide pensions and other benefits for our top-heavy population.

Indeed, after nearly 60 years, we must think in terms not only of missing babies but of missing parents and even missing grandparents.

Thanks to our decades-long TPP – Taxpayer Prevention Programme – successive governments have relied on importing migrants to fill the “employment gaps” that they themselves have created. But if they hoped to spend less on children – and perhaps most importantly, “free” women to engage in paid work – they failed to realise that adult migrants swell the benefits bill and sometimes commit unmentionable crimes.

And they forgot that migrants get old – a lot quicker than babies.

It is sad that warnings about our birth dearth are mostly utilitarian in nature, but is it any wonder that if we do not value children for their own sakes, we regard their absence in purely material terms?

When the Pied Piper lured away the village children, it caused a great deal of angst. But they did come back, and Hamelin learned an important lesson: there is nothing so much in demand as that which cannot be had. As for our own “missing millions”, sadly, it is no fairy tale; they will never come back, and we can only dream of what might have been.

And yet as younger generations start to realise that the economic burdens being placed upon them are the result of a decades-long culling of their unborn contemporaries, they may rebel against this lethal discrimination, and in that rebellion, we may see hope for the future. Let us pray it will not be too late.

As things stand, 58 years of legal killing marks a very unhappy anniversary.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.