By Hilary White
SWANWICK, UK, Sept. 9, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “The death-toll of World War II was a tragic prelude to the far greater slaughter by abortion and euthanasia that has happened since,” John Smeaton, Britain's leading pro-life advocate, told a national pro-life conference last weekend. “Deaths of unborn children worldwide through abortion vastly outnumber the total of military and civilian war deaths,” he added.
In his address “The Pro-Life Battle Ahead,” Smeaton, director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), told his audience, “We're not fighting Nazi tyranny but the tyranny of politicians who promote legislation worldwide that destroys the lives of unborn children.”
Smeaton warned about the challenges ahead for Britain, including the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a protocol developed to help make health care rationing decisions in Britain's nationalised health system that has resulted in effectively legalising euthanasia by dehydration. Smeaton said the LCP “is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to euthanasia practices in hospitals.”
The revered pro-life veteran, Dr. Jack Willke, head of Ohio's Life Issues Institute, also spoke at the conference. He told attendees that the landscape is slowly changing in favor of the right to life, with the pro-abortion arguments and slogans increasingly failing to convince the public. Women who have had abortions, he said, are now mothers and are advising their daughters not to make the same mistake they had made. At the same time, advances in prenatal scanning technology have made nonsense of abortion lobby claim that the unborn are not human but merely “blobs of tissue.”
Willke also refuted claims that tightening restrictions on abortion in Poland had led to increases in illegal abortions, dubbed “unsafe abortion” by the industry, and said that maternal morality, of great concern to pro-abortion lobbyists at the UN, is greatest in the areas in the developing world where abortion has been legalized. More and more pro-life crisis pregnancy centers are opening in the US, he said, and pro-life efforts have been widely successful at shutting down abortion facilities by tightening health regulations.
Willke pointed to the large families that pro-life people tend to have in comparison with their “pro-choice” friends. “We must keep doing what we're doing. It's slow but we shall win in the end,” he concluded.