Voice of the Family

A LAY INITIATIVE FORMED TO DEFEND

CATHOLIC TEACHING ON THE FAMILY

Religion and the abortion campaign (1)

By Ann Farmer   |   16 April 2025

This is the fourth of a twelve-part series, which began with Eugenics and the true history of the Abortion Campaign (1).

The abortion campaign emerged from eugenic population control, both movements strongly influenced by atheistic humanism and markedly anti-Catholic.

The teaching of the Catholic Church, which can be developed, but not fundamentally changed, forbids the taking of unborn human life from conception, in all circumstances, with none of those convenient “grey areas” so beloved of moral relativists and advocates of modern situational ethics. To the Church, some things are always and everywhere wrong; according to the Catholic Catechism:

“Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person — among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life. … Since the first century the church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law”.1

No wonder the Abortion Law Reform Association saw Catholics as an obstacle to their agenda, including left-wing Catholics.2 Pope Francis has likened abortion to “hiring a hitman” and when the eugenicist Mr Justice McCardie, who inspired ALRA co-founder Alice Jenkins, praised the low fees of a criminal abortionist because they were affordable for poor women, a Catholic journal remarked that “[o]ne might as well flatter a Chicago gunman for having “bumped off” or “rubbed out” a dozen or so of his fellow-creatures at the moderate fee of a dollar a head”.3 In contrast, a correspondent to a humanist newspaper called the judge’s remarks on birth control and abortion “brave and humane” and complained of attempts to “smother” his views.4

Abortion proponents appealed to anti-Catholic prejudice by portraying their views on social issues as lacking in compassion as well as illogical, and in 1964, Alice Jenkins referred to the “often insidious influence” of Catholicism “out of all proportion to its numbers”. She attacked Catholic opposition to abortion,5 erroneously claiming that this opposition was based on a belief in “ensoulment”, meaning that early abortion was allowable.6 She further claimed Catholic communities were “amongst the most poverty-stricken”, a poverty “intensified by their large families”.7 Despite attacking Catholic influence, she denied she was “prejudiced against Roman Catholicism”, whilst, in the context of post-war Irish immigration, quoting W J Thorne on the dangers of Rome “reconquering” England.8 Thorne, in the context of population issues, wrote in his book Your Future is Now:

“Over forty years ago a prominent Nonconformist divine wrote an excited book, ‘Shall Rome reconquer England?’ The threat Dr Horton saw was at that time little bigger than a man’s hand but if we could see the England of 2000 we might find that his fears were truly prophetic. Never since the Elizabethan settlement have there been so many practising Catholics in England, and each year the supply grows as boatload after boatload of Irish arrive to seek a higher standard of life. It is not necessary for … Catholics to constitute a majority for their Church to exert a decisive influence. The power of an united, well-disciplined, numerous minority operating amongst hordes of unattached individualists is usually sufficient to secure de facto power. We can be thankful that the Catholic ‘interest’ has not been formalized in England by the creation of a separate political party; it has achieved that distinction in some other countries and the results are not pretty”.9

Jenkins’s friend and ALRA co-founder Janet Chance regarded “[t]he priest” as an obstacle to their campaign, “defeated as an incendiarist of his fellow-men … politically and socially putting his hand over the mouths of the doctors, the scientists and the humanitarians”. She included abortion campaigners in the last category, while describing the children whose mothers, she alleged, had tried to abort them, as “Slaves of the Pope”.10 Similarly, fellow campaigner, Canadian eugenicist and population controller Stella Browne spoke of the “troll-like inhabitants [who] had grown into their present state” near a “West Country Cathedral”, living “in the shadow of the Cross”.11

Initially, the anti-Catholic approach worked well in promoting contraception as a “sensible” way of preventing abortion, against those “superstitious” and “not-very-intelligent” Catholics who were opposed to both. But contraception, by breaking the link between the marital act and the generation of new life, often led to abortion, or to sympathy for abortion as a “solution” to what, in the age of the “planned pregnancy”, came to be seen as an “unplanned pregnancy”. Contraceptive failure leading to abortion is something that abortion providers now admit: Ann Furedi of major abortion provider BPAS, while acknowledging this fact, adds that abortion for any reason is acceptable, and advocates the complete removal of all abortion laws. “Abortion,” she maintains, “is not a problem but the solution to a problem.” Indeed, back in the 1970s ‘family planning’ organisations banded together to defend abortion provision.12 However, the much-derided Catholic teaching about continence is much more in keeping with common sense than the incontinence seen as “inevitable” by birth controllers.

Nevertheless, in promoting abortion, campaigners could portray the Catholic stance as “extreme”, against their own “reasonable middle-way of allowing abortion only for “compassionate” reasons, in limited circumstances for hard cases. In 1936, having visited Germany to study their eugenics programme, Cicely Hamilton spoke “as a Christian” at ALRA’s first conference, against the “sin of cruelty”, claiming that unwanted pregnancy was a form of “bodily punishment”.13 As in so many humanist campaigns, appeals to “compassion” aimed at portraying Christian opponents as cruel and uncaring. Historically, some Christians, famously St Thomas More, have been humanists,14 but in modern usage the term implies that non-Christians care more about humans than do Christians. Apart from a handful of high-profile eugenicists — including Sir Arnold Wilson, the Bishop of Birmingham, Dean Inge of St Paul’s, and the Modern Churchmen’s Union — most in the eugenics movement followed Darwinistic beliefs, as did the tiny population control movement of Neo-Malthusians, which was avowedly anti-religious. The “compassionate” reasons advanced for eugenics measures, including abortion, suggest that a religious vocabulary was considered necessary in a society still broadly Christian in outlook; and while self-described Christian eugenicists may have been sincere in their religious protestations, most significantly, this did not prevent them working closely with the eugenics movement and the abortion campaign, where religion was attacked and denigrated.

Ironically, in 1865, it was a Catholic — an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel — who, unknown to Darwin, presented evidence for the actual mechanism of heredity, throwing doubt on Darwinian assumptions about human “progress” and “degeneration”. Eugenics was exposed as ‘scientific snobbery’,15 and it was some time before the Eugenics Society addressed Mendel’s findings — and even then snobbery triumphed over science.[Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was a eugenicist with firm views on race: “Fisher held onto his views about eugenics long after the Second World War, when eugenics had fallen into disrepute. In the years immediately after the war, Fisher remained on friendly terms with former Nazi geneticist Otmar Freiherr Verschuer, and used his data in his criticisms of the proposed link between smoking and cancer. … Fisher also expressed sympathy towards the eugenics policies of the Nazis. During the war, Verschuer had worked directly alongside Josef Mengele, using biological samples obtained from Jews murdered in concentration camps. Verschuer was never convicted of war crimes, and redefined himself as a geneticist in Germany after the war. He remained a eugenicist until his death in 1969. We do not know if Fisher was fully aware of Verschuer’s direct associations with Nazi experimentation on people.” Fisher created a new Darwinism based on the genetical theory of natural selection, although he himself was an Anglican, and “few were willing to follow his claim that natural selection was the kind of creative force a Christian could endorse.” In contrast, the “modernist” “presented humankind as the agent of progressive evolution, ignoring the traditional Christian belief” in Original sin, which to them was “no more than the awakening of the moral sense in our apelike ancestors.” This modernist stance was “very close to that presented by some explicitly non-Christian thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley” (Bowler, P. J., Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, Ltd., 1983/2009), p. 323). See: Fisher, R. A., The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).

This series will continue to next month with Religion and the abortion campaign (2).

NOTES

  1. Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994/95), Para. 2270–2271. ↩︎
  2. Letter, C. P. Blacker to Janet Chance, October 7, 1935 (Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/C65). ↩︎
  3. Editorial, The Tablet, December 26, 1931. ↩︎
  4. The Freethinker, December 20, 1931. ↩︎ ↩︎
  5. Jenkins, A., Law for the Rich (London: Charles Skilton Ltd., 1964), p 19. ↩︎
  6. Ibid, p15. ↩︎
  7. Ibid, p43. ↩︎
  8. Ibid, pp 44–45 ↩︎
  9. Thorne, W. J., Your Future is Now (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956), p 104. ↩︎
  10. Chance, J., The Cost of English Morals (London: Noel Douglas, 1932), p. 62. ↩︎
  11. Browne, S., letter to The Freethinker, December 20, 1931. ↩︎
  12. Noted from literature. The umbrella group “Co-ord”, set up in 1976 to co-ordinate resistance to Labour MP James White’s Bill to restrict abortion, was housed by the Birth Control Trust, an organisation also set up by the Family Planning Association. The Trust’s charitable status meant it could not campaign for legislation, but despite this, it supported the “Voice for Choice” campaign. “REASON”, another umbrella organisation set up to campaign for abortion, represented birth control and population control organisations and also abortion providers, including the Conservation Society, the FPA, Doctors and Overpopulation Group, Pregnancy Advisory Service, BCC, Brook Advisory Centres, ALRA and the Simon Population Trust. For the role of ‘umbrella groups’ in abortion politics, see: Marsh, D., Chambers, J. Abortion Politics (London: Junction Books Ltd., p. 48). ↩︎
  13. Eugenics Society File: SA/EUG/D1. ↩︎
  14. See: Bequette, J. P., Christian Humanism: Creation, Redemption, and Reintegration (University Press of America, 2007). ↩︎
  15. The Augustinian monk’s pea plant experiments were conducted between 1856 and 1863; he presented his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden — “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” — on 8 February and 8 March 1865 at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia; his study was unknown to Darwin and largely ignored, although it is now considered a work of fundamental importance in the field of genetics. Several years later, in England, William Bateson was the chief promulgator of Mendel’s ideas following their rediscovery by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. However, the Eugenics Society took little interest; see: Bateson, W., Materials for the Study of Variation Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species (1894); Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence (1902); Bowler, P. J., Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, Ltd., 1983/2009), pp. 259-60. Bateson “promulgated the Mendelian view of inheritance” to a meeting of the Royal Society in 1902” (Report of the Galton Institute Annual Conference, October 1, 2009, ‘William Bateson: His exceptions and Origin of Species Revisited’, The Galton Institute Newsletter, Issue No. 72, December 2009, pp. 1-3).
    Ultimately, the version of Darwinism embraced by the liberal Left — Neo-Lamarckism, which posited that environmental measures could improve the heredity of individuals, and the improvements passed down to their children — was outflanked by Mendel’s genetics; however, the attachment to environmental “evolution” did not prevent its adherents from citing Darwinism’s “harsh image” as they attempted “to brand all forms of biological determinism as morally suspect”. (Bowler, P. J., Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, Ltd., 1983/2009), p. 317). ↩︎

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