Britain’s Parliament just made two shocking rulings.
- Mothers will be able to kill their babies right up until the point of birth, according to a June 17 vote.
- Terminally ill adults will be able to get government help killing themselves, according to a bill passed on June 20.
In both cases, the brutality of what is being approved is concealed behind more comfortable euphemisms. We talk of “decriminalizing abortion” instead of murdering babies, and “euthanasia” instead of state-assisted killing. These are words that, as George Orwell wrote, “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
“A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details,” he wrote.
But the details are horrific.
Currently, abortion in the United Kingdom is allowed until the 24th week of pregnancy; after that, it is only permissible in exceptional circumstances.
The vote means it is still illegal for a doctor to help a woman murder her baby after 24 weeks—but the woman herself won’t be prosecuted. If she uses drugs to murder her baby the day before it would have been born, no one will be punished.
The vote was preceded by an emotional focus on a small number of women. During the covid pandemic, Britain made abortion medicine (“baby poison” may be a more accurate term) more easily available. A small number of women used this to kill babies after 24 weeks, and they were prosecuted. This was presented as a grave miscarriage of justice and used to drum up support for the law.
Part of the unspoken background to this is that it will also make sex-selective abortion easier. Since the gender of a baby becomes clear later in the pregnancy, there isn’t always time to organize an abortion before the 24-week limit.
Meanwhile, Parliament passed the euthanasia bill after months of investigation. Canada enacted a similar program in 2016. In 2023, state-assisted murder was the fourth leading cause of death in the nation, behind cancer, heart disease and accidental deaths. The results of their program are shocking:
- Former Paralympian and veteran Christine Gauthier complained about how long it was taking to install a stair lift. Veteran Affairs Canada offered to help kill her more promptly.
- Alan Nichols was helped to die by the state without any of his family being informed. His problem? Hearing loss.
- A hospital ethicist encouraged Roger Foley to kill himself—citing the cost to Canada’s health-care system of keeping him alive. When he refused, they denied him food and water.
The director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, Tim Stainton, called Canada’s euthanasia law “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”
Britain also has a massively expensive socialist health-care system. How long before it starts pressuring expensive patients to kill themselves?
Legalizing euthanasia is broadly popular, with surveys finding that about three quarters of British support it. Meanwhile, only 1 percent of the British public support abortion up until birth.
Yet both have been passed with little comment. Beyond a few articles in the right-wing press, they haven’t been major stories. The government’s attempts to get the massive bill for out-of-work benefits under control has gained much more attention.
Behind both these laws is a society that does not value life the way God and the Bible do. The only command repeated in the first five books of the Bible is that a murderer should be put to death. This applies even to someone who kills an unborn baby (Exodus 21:22-23).
We can get led away from this with compassionate-sounding arguments. The result is always more death. Arguments for abortion generally first center on rare cases of rape. Once that is accepted, then people emphasize compassion for mothers in difficult situations. They say that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”—as the Democratic Party once did in its platform. Then we’re told to have compassion for mothers who are six months pregnant, can’t afford to have a child, and don’t know what to do. What’s next, “post-birth” abortions? Some have advocated for it—and the difference between this and the UK’s new ruling is only a matter of days, or even hours.
Canada’s experience on euthanasia has followed the same trajectory. Initially it was only for adults whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” Soon that was dropped and other safeguards removed. In 2024, Canada’s Parliament voted to allow those with purely mental illnesses to kill themselves. The deadline for this has been pushed back until 2027.
The Bible makes clear that any abortion and any euthanasia is murder. By compromising with this law just a “little,” man has gone quickly further and further in the way of sin.
Our nations are going bankrupt. Nuclear weapons proliferate. The world is becoming more dangerous. Stories like this explain why.
God is angry with Britain, America, Canada and all these nations embracing sin. He wants the vulnerable protected, and He promises to intervene if they are abused or taken advantage of. “Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child,” God commands. “If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I will surely hear their cry; And my wrath shall wax hot, and I will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your children fatherless” (Exodus 22:22-24).
God condemns “you who burn with lust among the oaks, under every green tree; who slay your children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks” (Isaiah 57:5; Revised Standard Version).
In Ezekiel, God says, “[T]hou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them” (Ezekiel 16:21). This chapter is addressed to “Jerusalem”—yet Ezekiel wrote too late to give any kind of warning to ancient Jerusalem.
Instead the identity of his audience points to an even greater condemnation. It is a warning primarily for spiritual Jerusalem—God’s Church—but also to all of the descendants of the ancient tribes of Israel, of which Jerusalem was the capital.
As Herbert W. Armstrong proved in his free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy, Britain, Canada, the U.S. and others are descended from the tribes of Israel. The book of Genesis contains promises of national greatness that were never fulfilled in the Jews. Instead the great wealth and power possessed by the British Empire and the U.S. come from God’s promises to Abraham.
That means our people have a history with God. Britain’s common law and America’s Constitution have their roots in the Bible. We, of all people, should know better. Instead we are leading people into more sin.
“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live,” Moses told Israel. Is there any greater evidence that we have chosen death and cursing?
God wants to give Britain, Canada and the world blessings. He wants them to live. So He is sending punishment. We’re living a way of life that kills the most vulnerable and does ourselves incredible harm. Only living a different way of life can change that. The punishment is designed to help us choose the way of life that causes blessings and life. Our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy shows how God is doing that.
