ABORTION: THE CHILDREN WHO WOULD HAVE BEEN BAPTISED

The painful reality has to be faced that many thousands of children 'terminated' in Britain through abortion since 1967 would have been baptised.

Taking into account the falling numbers of children being brought for baptism since the 1960s, it is nonetheless incontrovertible that the overwhelming majority of abortions in England and Wales are to mothers, both white and Afro-Caribbean, whose religious background, such as it is, would be Christian. Someone in their wider family, probably at the older end, would have been baptised in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

According to government statistics kindly supplied to Cranmer's Curate by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, of the 189,574 abortions to residents of England and Wales in 2010, 76 per cent of the women involved were white and nine per cent were black.

It is undeniable that the majority of 'Christian-background' children aborted last year, had they been allowed to live, would have grown up in a completely secular environment - what has been justly described as 'pre-Christian' Britain. But children aborted in the 1970s and 1980s, who would now be in adulthood, would have been much closer to Christian Britain. Many of their grandparents, if not their parents, would have been baptised.

It is therefore quite possible that some of them, through wider family or adoptive parental influence, could have come into contact with a local church through baptism. That is not to assert the erroneous doctrine of baptismal regeneration ex opere operato. But it is to state the fact of parochial life that children who get involved in Sunday schools very often come through the baptismal route.

That means some of these children could have learned the love of Christ in childhood; some of them could have owned Christian faith for themselves in adolescence and early adulthood and come to Confirmation; some of them could have become leaders in the Church and in society, serving the living Christ and their fellow men and women in our generation.

A revival of the Christian faith is the only hope for the renewal of British society whose profound spiritual and moral problems were so shamefully exposed by the August riots.

God’s created image-bearers – according to Psalm 139 fearfully and wonderfully knit together in their mothers’ wombs – who through the wonder of spiritual rebirth could have become part of the solution were cruelly cut off.

The devastating spiritual, moral and social cost of abortion is that it has deprived Britain of some great Christians.

This piece - Anti-Anglican attack on Sydney Diocese - appeared on VirtueOnline.