A Pro-life Special Relationship

Human Life Review, Winter 2008 by Short, Edward

By exposing the false logic of the pro-abortion lobby, Prof. Scarisbrick and LIFE are waking up the British public to the evils of abortion. At the same time, by offering vital housing, counseling, and other maternity services they provide practical life-affirming options that truly redound to the good health and well-being of mothers-to-be and their newborns. In accomplishing his work with the help of talented American pro-lifers, Prof. Scarisbrick is also renewing the pro-life special relationship, which, pace Furedi, mops up the floor with the proponents of the culture of death, who are as muddled as they are unconscionable.

NOTES

1. Winston Churchill quoted in Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (London, 2006)641.

2. William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (New York, 1896) 15.

3. J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Folio Society, 2004) 461.

4. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783. (Oxford, 1989) 253.

5. Returning home from New York in 1924, Noel Coward met Marie Stopes on board the SS Cedric. At the time, Coward's first play, The Vortex, had just completed a successful run on the London stage. The play was about a debauched mother and her drug addicted son, "trapped," as Coward put it, "in a vortex of beastliness." After seeing the play, Stopes wrote Coward an effusive letter suggesting that they team up and write a sequel. Coward wrote her back: "I am afraid I never collaborate with anyone, and even if I did, it would not be over a sequel to The Vortex, as psychologically speaking, there is no sequel-unless of course the gardener's boy found the box of cocaine and gave it to his younger sister who took a boat to Marseilles and went into a bad house; one of those particularly bad houses for which Marseilles is justly famous." See The Letters of Noel Coward, ed. Barry Day (New York, 2007) 71.

6. See The Daily Telegraph, "Clinic Reports busiest month for abortions," Sarah Womack, September 9, 2007.

7. I am indebted for this précis of the disappointments of the pro-life movement to Decca Aitkenhead and her piece in The Independent, "New lease of Life the struggle for life," August, 11, 1996.

8. Readers interested in comparative infamy might wish to see what Ian Kershaw has to say about the relationship between Nazi Germany's euthanasia program and the roots of the Holocaust. See Chapter 6, "Licensing Barbarism," in Ian Kershaw's Hitler: 1936-1945:Nemesis. (New York, 2000) 231-279. See also Scarisbrick, Let There Be Life, 30.

9. See Lifenews.com, "British High Court Judge Approves Euthanasia of Baby Charlotte," Steven Ertelt, October 8, 2004.

10. Ibid.

11. See Kershaw, Hitler: 1936- 1945: Nemesis (New York, 2000), 257.

12. See The Daily Telegraph, "Revealed: two women the after taking controversial new abortion pill," Michael Day and Susan Bisset, January 17, 2004. And Lifenews.com, "Brit. Gov: Two Women Died After Taking RU 486," Steven Ertelt, January 19, 2004.

13. See LifeNews.com, "British Physicians Oppose Government Plan for Abortions at Doctors' Offices," December 30, 2007.