In a historic first, 22 pro-life evangelicals are running for British Parliament on a single issue: to end the intentional mass murder of children in the womb nationwide.

Provoking the fury of pro-abortion candidates from all mainstream political parties, the pro-life coalition is running under the banner Vote Life and targeting high-profile parliamentarians who support decriminalizing abortion up to birth. The elections will be held tomorrow, July 4.

The group’s platform statement reads: “The legal, state-funded killing of this group is without doubt the defining moral issue of our time” because babies in the womb are “human beings — fearfully and wonderfully made” and not mere “clumps of cells” or “pregnancy tissue.”

“We would never make tonsillectomy a defining voting issue,” Vote Life’s manifesto states, urging individuals to reflect on whether they are “supporting a party or candidate who condones the intentional loss of 252,000 innocent lives annually.”

Abortion Takes More Lives than Wars

“The greatest issue facing our country is not the war in Ukraine, or Gaza, nor climate change, nor NHS waiting times, nor knife crime, nor the housing crisis, nor inflation, nor mass immigration,” the pro-lifers contend.

All these other subjects are incredibly important and require prayerful, thoughtful and wise policy decisions, but so long as we have no clarity on when a human being should be protected by law, all of our other policies have no moral underpinning.

Commenting on the public concerns of genocide in recent conflicts, the pro-lifers note:

Before we pass moral judgment on the actions of foreign nations, or attempt to enter into the complexities of aiding groups with different moral standards and priorities to our own, surely we must first address the quarter of a million babies we are killing on our own soil? As far as allegations of genocide go, ours is much harder to defend.

Responding to fears over environmental hazards, Vote Life explains how one of the UK’s largest abortion providers (BPAS) explicitly states that ‘Pregnancy Remains’ can be “flushed down the lavatory or wrapped in a tissue, placed in a small plastic bag and put in a dustbin.”

“Globally we do this to around 73 million babies a year,” Vote Life points out. “To repent of this, would not simply help to realign us with God but with the created order as well.”

The Politics of Abortion

“For too long on election day, God-fearing men and women have been playing a game of ‘the lesser of two evils’ rather than being a voice for the voiceless,” Vote Life spokesman Christian Hacking told The Stream.

“Under the Conservative government, abortions have risen exponentially, increasing 17% last year, and under Labour it is set to get worse. Meanwhile, smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, Greens, and the Social Democrats, which often attract the Christian vote, avidly support abortion. Over 10 million babies have been intentionally killed since 1967,” he added.

“To give our vote to these parties is to consent to more babies being put to death.”

The pro-lifers are specifically targeting three high-profile pro-abortion politicians — Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy (Labour) and Caroline Nokes (Conservative) — who have all proposed or supported amendments to Britain’s Criminal Justice Bill, which would end prosecutions for anyone taking the life of a baby in the womb in England and Wales.

The bill, which was introduced in Britain’s House of Commons last November, has been put on hold as the general election was called and Parliament dissolved for the session.

Creasy, a member of parliament for Walthamstow, a town in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, is being challenged by Ruth Rawlins, a Christian pro-lifer. Rawlins also serves as communications director for Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBRUK), an allied movement of pro-lifers who display images of fetuses to create awareness of in the womb and the brutality and inhumanity of surgical or chemical abortion. The group launched a #StopStella campaign in 2019 after the MP successfully led a vote for “abortion rights” in Northern Ireland.

Creasy, who also believes that “a woman can have a penis,” has accused the pro-lifers of a “history of intimidating and threatening behavior” and asked for police protection at the local hustings if Rawlins were to participate in a debate.

She also has repeatedly attempted to curb CBRUK’s pro-life activities. On Sunday, Creasy tweeted a video attacking Vote Life’s campaign leaflets for using images of an embryo at the sixth week of gestation.

“I am sorry that these leaflets are going through people’s door with these images in them,” Creasy said, stressing that she had complained to the “Advertising Standards Authority” and this was “now a matter for the Electoral Commission.”

Meet the Candidates

Many of the pro-life candidates have been heckled and abused by pro-abortion activists while campaigning and at public meetings, Rawlins told The Stream.

Among them are Mark Townsend, a father of four and former atheist who spent two short spells in prison before he encountered Christ.

“As a young man I pressured a woman into having an abortion simply to hide my infidelity, but now with a clearer understanding of what an abortion is, and with a clear understanding of how valuable every life is, I want to fight for every baby’s right to life,” he is telling voters.

Pauline Peachey, a mother of three and grandmother of eight, says she is standing as a pro-life candidate because of her own experience as a post-abortive woman.

“I have seen firsthand the dehumanizing of a baby who became a ‘fetus’ when the doctor realized it would be disabled or might for any other reason be a ‘problem,’” she says. “I have struggled with the aftermath of abortion for decades, talked with hundreds of women whose bereavement has not been acknowledged.

“There is recovery in Christ for us all.”

Sarah Barber, a pro-life candidate from Wimbledon, is “a married woman who has experienced many years of infertility and suffered the loss of a baby through miscarriage.”

“I am even more aware of the inherent value of each human being,” she writes. “I am not a strong woman but I do serve a strong God.”

Rob Rawlins, Vote Life’s candidate for Ely & East Cambridgeshire, testifies that he “was part of the swinging 60s and briefly embraced a lifestyle with no sexual morals” before he met Jesus.

“One time, getting intimate with a new girlfriend, I said, ‘We haven’t got any protection.’ She replied, ‘Don’t worry, I abort easily.’ I wasn’t with her long enough to know if she conceived, then aborted my baby. Now I am shocked by this,” he tells voters.

Victory for Life

The candidates know they have almost no chance of winning a single seat. But that doesn’t matter because their goal is not political victory but educating “the nation on the humanity and value of unborn children and the reality of abortion.”

Their secondary goal is to make churches aware of their own failure in challenging Britain’s abortion genocide. Unlike the U.S., it has had almost no Christian pro-life movement within the churches.

“We may stand against certain ‘Christian’ or ‘pro-life’ candidates who objectively fall short of clear moral, legal and biblical standards in defence of life,” the coalition’s website warns. “Ultimately we are exposing an injustice here. This will no doubt cause tension, pain and ugliness. But these are necessary displeasures if we are to heal.”

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.