All Party Pro Life

The All Party Pro-Life Group in Parliament is a group of UK Parliamentarians in the Houses of Commons and Lords, from the main political parties as well as Cross Benchers in the Lords. Pro-Life politicians are represented from all major strands of political opinion including; liberals, democratic socialists, social democrats, nationalists, conservatives and unionists. We seek to uphold the intrinsic value and innate dignity of all human life from conception to natural death.

The All Party Pro-Life Group in Parliament regards the experimentation on human embryos and their artificial creation for the sake of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) as inconsistent with the value that should be placed on human beings in the earliest stages of their development. To create human life solely or partly motivated by a desire for medical or cosmetic experimentation undermines the value of the dignity of human persons. Whilst enabling the artificial creation of embryos for IVF inevitably involves the destruction of those embryos left unused.

The Group gently seeks to (re)establish the rational principle that human personhood begins once fertilisation is complete, commonly known as the point of conception. It is reasonable to point out that to suggest that personhood begins at any later point is ultimately inconsistent with the principle that all human lives, regardless of their physical development, are of equal worth.

The All Party Pro-Life Group in Parliament is opposed to modern eugenics. The Group is vehemently opposed to the practice of forced abortions, gender selective abortions and forced sterilizations that are practiced in some of our developing countries, often with the increasing and active participation of international abortion providers.

In British law abortion is permissible up to term when; ‘there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.’ (Abortion Act 1967)

Although abortion for reasons of serious disability, are a minority of the overall abortion rate, it is nevertheless a direct and unjust discrimination in our law against people with disabilities if they can be aborted at any point in a pregnancy, whereas the majority of abortions are only legal within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This is one element of a creeping (and often unconscious) eugenics within British society.

The Group also opposes the more recent development of eugenics in our society which is the screening of human embryos created for IVF. The screening of embryos created in artificial circumstances (which can be gender selective) often involves screening for possible disease and disability. Those embryos considered to be at risk of developing either a specific disease or more generally at risk are destroyed.

The All Party Pro-Life Group in Parliament seeks to see both a reduction in unwanted pregnancy and the abortion rate. It is generally recognised that even with recent welcome falls, Britain still has the highest abortion rate of any western European democracy. The Group therefore seeks to bring the UK’s abortion rate down to the lowest level in Europe and eventually bring the practice of abortion on demand to an end. The Group affirms the major strides in women’s equality that have been achieved in recent times and supports the continued pursuit of the recognition of women’s innate equal dignity. The Group would however question whether society’s continued reliance on access to abortion can be consistent with women’s full equality when no woman would want to have the procedure.

In other words it is clear that the widespread practice of abortion reinforces the very cycle of inequality that women continue to face. Everything that has been achieved by the women’s movement to bring gender equality should and needs to be maintained. But if such achievements are in some way dependent on the continued recourse to a procedure that no women would actually want then can it truly be regarded as part of the realisation of women’s innate status of equal dignity?

The All Party Pro-Life Group in Parliament is opposed to any further relaxation of the law against euthanasia or assisted suicide. The reasoned case against any legally permissible killing of one person by another or assisted by another is that this completely undermines the most important and foundational principle of both our ethical and legal framework as a society. The principle at stake is that all human life is precious and all people are innately valuable and of equal worth. We therefore have a responsibility as a society to uphold the value of human life and so the deliberate taking of someone’s life is not permissible, in law or in our universal understanding of our own ethics.