Greg Swenson is Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK.
Last Thursday, the starting gun was fired on the US election campaign as Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate. The debate took place 24 hours after the final head-to-head debate here in the UK between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.
There will of course be many similarities between these overlapping campaigns. The themes that have dominated the British campaign – the economy, Ukraine, tax, the scale of immigration and healthcare – can be expected to feature in my home country. These issues are global problems shared across the developed world.
And yet one major issue in the upcoming US campaign has been absent from discussion over here: abortion.
Abortion is a significant issue in every US election cycle but, with November’s election being the first since the repeal of Roe v Wade, it is set to take on greater prominence this year.
Of course for the leaders of the major British political parties, it will probably be a great relief that they are not likely to be asked their views on a law that means our abortion time limit is double that of the average in EU countries.
And yet, abortion ought not to be omitted from our political discourse. Just a few days after the Prime Minister announced the general election, the Government published the latest annual figures that showed that in 2022, for the first time, over a quarter of a million abortions had taken place in England and Wales in a single year.
This astonishing statistic, unknown to many people who still assume abortion is and ought to be, at best, relatively rare, went by almost unnoticed.
In light of this abortion epidemic, I would contend, as an American looking in, that the absence of this issue from the election campaign is symptomatic of the paucity of moral disputation in British political debate, whereby the convention of a free vote on so-called conscience issues means political parties can evade taking views on issues that are literally matters of life and death.
The consequence of this tradition is that little parliamentary time or media attention is given to issues such as abortion; the impression is thus given that abortion is a settled issue about which we must not protest, lest we risk causing offence by expressing an opinion on a matter about which we are supposedly free to disagree.
Such thinking is alien to almost all political conservatives in the US, to whom the idea that leading political leaders would just shrug their shoulders at the projected more than one million abortions that have taken place in just one parliamentary cycle here in the UK would cause consternation.
At some point, we as a society will have to address this issue. In particular, the conservative movement in the UK cannot keep pretending this is not a subject upon which to take a collective position; after all, if we will not conserve life itself, at its most vulnerable stage, how can we justify conserving any of those things which bring meaning to life?
There are other reasons why this subject, however sensitive, cannot be ignored. Another topic that has been conspicuously absent from the election campaign has been the increasingly catastrophic decline in birth rates in the Western world, including the UK.
This is rapidly becoming an existential problem. It is also a problem that directly relates to issues that political leaders are happy to discuss – what to do about pensions, social care costs, taxation and the NHS, in a country where fewer people are being born, meaning there will be fewer people in the workforce in the coming years to prop up the needs of an ageing population.
The response of the liberal establishment has been to rely on the sticking plaster of mass immigration to plug the hole, but this is a short-term solution that only kicks the can down the road, bringing with it other concerns.
Conservatives are right to question the wisdom of this sticking plaster. But if both unchecked immigration and a falling birthrate are ticking time bombs, where does the solution lie? Cultivating a pronatalist, pro-family, pro-life culture, one that does not see a quarter of a million unborn lives as disposable each year, would be a good place to start.
This need not lead to the polarised culture wars of American political discourse. Conservatives are instinctively pro-life because they understand that conserving shared values and traditions aspires towards and requires the creation of the next generation to whom these ideals are passed down. Healthy, self-respecting cultures have children; self-loathing, confused, dying cultures lack the incentive to do so.
But conservatives can make common cause here with those on the traditional Left who are increasingly uneasy with the obliteration of the differences between the sexes, who may increasingly find they wish to protect women from the fiction that equality and their ability to flourish requires them to shun their distinctive capacity to bear and raise the next generation, even at the cost of ending the lives of their children.
In the dying days of the last Parliament, two Labour MPs sought to introduce legislation that would have allowed women to perform their own abortions for any reason up to birth with no legal sanction. The Liberal Democrat manifesto appears to support such moves by asserting women’s rights “to make independent decisions over their reproductive health without interference by the state”.
The question is whether conservatives will provide any opposition to such extreme moves, or continue to pretend abortion is a merely private matter, and whether some on the Left will find the moral courage to push back at the hyper-individualism and unfettered self-determination that has led so-called progressives to elevate a woman’s ‘right to choose’ above protecting the most vulnerable.
Greg Swenson is Chairman of Republicans Overseas UK.
Last Thursday, the starting gun was fired on the US election campaign as Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in the first presidential debate. The debate took place 24 hours after the final head-to-head debate here in the UK between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.
There will of course be many similarities between these overlapping campaigns. The themes that have dominated the British campaign – the economy, Ukraine, tax, the scale of immigration and healthcare – can be expected to feature in my home country. These issues are global problems shared across the developed world.
And yet one major issue in the upcoming US campaign has been absent from discussion over here: abortion.
Abortion is a significant issue in every US election cycle but, with November’s election being the first since the repeal of Roe v Wade, it is set to take on greater prominence this year.
Of course for the leaders of the major British political parties, it will probably be a great relief that they are not likely to be asked their views on a law that means our abortion time limit is double that of the average in EU countries.
And yet, abortion ought not to be omitted from our political discourse. Just a few days after the Prime Minister announced the general election, the Government published the latest annual figures that showed that in 2022, for the first time, over a quarter of a million abortions had taken place in England and Wales in a single year.
This astonishing statistic, unknown to many people who still assume abortion is and ought to be, at best, relatively rare, went by almost unnoticed.
In light of this abortion epidemic, I would contend, as an American looking in, that the absence of this issue from the election campaign is symptomatic of the paucity of moral disputation in British political debate, whereby the convention of a free vote on so-called conscience issues means political parties can evade taking views on issues that are literally matters of life and death.
The consequence of this tradition is that little parliamentary time or media attention is given to issues such as abortion; the impression is thus given that abortion is a settled issue about which we must not protest, lest we risk causing offence by expressing an opinion on a matter about which we are supposedly free to disagree.
Such thinking is alien to almost all political conservatives in the US, to whom the idea that leading political leaders would just shrug their shoulders at the projected more than one million abortions that have taken place in just one parliamentary cycle here in the UK would cause consternation.
At some point, we as a society will have to address this issue. In particular, the conservative movement in the UK cannot keep pretending this is not a subject upon which to take a collective position; after all, if we will not conserve life itself, at its most vulnerable stage, how can we justify conserving any of those things which bring meaning to life?
There are other reasons why this subject, however sensitive, cannot be ignored. Another topic that has been conspicuously absent from the election campaign has been the increasingly catastrophic decline in birth rates in the Western world, including the UK.
This is rapidly becoming an existential problem. It is also a problem that directly relates to issues that political leaders are happy to discuss – what to do about pensions, social care costs, taxation and the NHS, in a country where fewer people are being born, meaning there will be fewer people in the workforce in the coming years to prop up the needs of an ageing population.
The response of the liberal establishment has been to rely on the sticking plaster of mass immigration to plug the hole, but this is a short-term solution that only kicks the can down the road, bringing with it other concerns.
Conservatives are right to question the wisdom of this sticking plaster. But if both unchecked immigration and a falling birthrate are ticking time bombs, where does the solution lie? Cultivating a pronatalist, pro-family, pro-life culture, one that does not see a quarter of a million unborn lives as disposable each year, would be a good place to start.
This need not lead to the polarised culture wars of American political discourse. Conservatives are instinctively pro-life because they understand that conserving shared values and traditions aspires towards and requires the creation of the next generation to whom these ideals are passed down. Healthy, self-respecting cultures have children; self-loathing, confused, dying cultures lack the incentive to do so.
But conservatives can make common cause here with those on the traditional Left who are increasingly uneasy with the obliteration of the differences between the sexes, who may increasingly find they wish to protect women from the fiction that equality and their ability to flourish requires them to shun their distinctive capacity to bear and raise the next generation, even at the cost of ending the lives of their children.
In the dying days of the last Parliament, two Labour MPs sought to introduce legislation that would have allowed women to perform their own abortions for any reason up to birth with no legal sanction. The Liberal Democrat manifesto appears to support such moves by asserting women’s rights “to make independent decisions over their reproductive health without interference by the state”.
The question is whether conservatives will provide any opposition to such extreme moves, or continue to pretend abortion is a merely private matter, and whether some on the Left will find the moral courage to push back at the hyper-individualism and unfettered self-determination that has led so-called progressives to elevate a woman’s ‘right to choose’ above protecting the most vulnerable.