It has been a strange couple of weeks for the pro-life movement in Britain, enjoying the unusual, indeed unnerving sensation of winning the battle.

 

First came the Daily Telegraph’s undercover investigation into sex-selected abortions, a practice that has become widespread in the UK as a result south Asian immigration.

 

This has been an open secret for some time. When my wife and I went for the 20-week scan for our second child the doctor casually mentioned that in certain parts of Britain she would be unable to inform us of the sex; in Scotland this rule was implemented after the authorities noticed a significant imbalance in the number of Asian boys and girls entering school.

 

Many non-native cultural practises, such as forced marriage and genital mutilation, and now witchcraft horrify Britons of all political persuasions, but in this case it’s hardly something we can moralise about, with 200,000 unborn children being killed every year in Britain, the vast majority for non-medical reasons.

 

As I wrote in the Daily Telegraph, this has led to some strange moral confusion among the pro-choice establishment.

 

When the Abortion Act was debated and passed in 1967 it was intended to be used for the hardest of hard cases, to save the estimated 12-20 women who died each year from illegal abortions. The issue of “choice”, a catchphrase thought up by Bernard Nathanson before he underwent one of the most dramatic changes of heart of recent years, is a later rationale.

 

Choice has since became not just a right, but even a good, which is what makes the cries of “discrimination” in this case so bizarre; after all, what is discrimination if not choice? They are the same thing, except that one is now applied to thought crime and the other to a woman’s sacred duty.

 

The contradiction of the pro-abortion stance is illustrated by the fact that the most vehement campaigners for a woman’s right to choose are the most hostile to the Government’s free schools policy, which will allow parents to set up their own schools and give them much more choice in areas where the only options are currently underperforming state comprehensives. A woman has the right to kill her child at 24 weeks, but not to decide where he goes to school.

 

The most pro-abortion but anti-school choice newspaper is the Guardian, Britain’s pre-eminent liberal publication and one that has a disproportionate influence due to its close links with the BBC (everyone at the latter reads it). The newspaper, which is read by many teachers, has been running a series of attack stories on education secretary Michael Gove in recent weeks.

 

The Guardian is incredibly hostile to any pro-life sentiment, its style guide informing writers to use “pro-choice” but not “pro-life”. The Guardian even declared Marie Stopes to be its “woman of the millennium” a few years back, the family planning pioneer’s extreme racist views whitewashed (the Guardian will accuse someone of racism at the drop of a hat; Marie Stopes wrote love poetry to Adolf Hitler).

 

The Guardian likes to categorise any pro-life sentiment as “Right-wing”, even though abortion isn’t a particularly Left-wing thing. One of their main objections to school choice is that it creates inequality and discrimination (as freedom inevitably does). Yet so does abortion: it is not just females who are more likely to be terminated, but blacks, the poor and especially the disabled. British Labour supporters are slightly more likely to be pro-life than Conservatives. But generally speaking Britain is a far less pro-life country than the US, primarily because it is far less religious, and European conservatism is far more secular.

 

The British pro-life movement has endured defeat after defeat these past decades, fighting not so much a culture war as a culture massacre. Like many losing sides, it has fallen into in-fighting, often very bitter, as when last year’s modest attempt by Tory MP Nadine Dorries to break the monopoly of abortion providers in the business of abortion counselling ended in failure and recrimination.

 

But then came a second enormous gift into the pro-life hands, with the Catholic Herald breaking the story of two academics in the Journal of Medical Ethics making the argument: “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” The Guardian ran on the alleged death threats made by pro-life fanatics popular bogeymen in Guardian folklore. In that case one has to question the intelligence of the people making the threats, since the paper was an enormous gift to the pro-life movement. After all, if one believes in killing in the womb, especially up to birth, why not kill newborns? What exactly is the difference? It is logically valid, and pro-choice advocates know it.

 

Rather than sending these academics death threats, Catholics should be petitioning for them to receive papal medals.