Orwell was correct when he commented that the key to changing the mind of the masses was to play with words until it was impossible to think of certain ideas because there were no words for them. In 1984 he had in mind words like ‘freedom’ and ‘rebellion’, but for our generation it is the word ‘choice’ used in the context of pregnancy.

Except in cases of rape, there is always a choice involved in getting pregnant; if you do not have sexual intercourse you need not worry about pregnancy. We now have, in the western world, one of the most ruthlessly effective advertising public health campaigns to foist contraception on folk, and yet the number of abortions rises relentlessly. We’ve been told by successive governments that the key to it all is more ‘sex education’ and younger and younger ages; and the number of abortions rises relentlessly. People seem reluctant to make the one choice which affects only them – that is not to indulge in sexual intercourse; they even seem reluctant to use contraceptives; but it is OK, they know that, in the UK at least, if they go to a doctor they can get an abortion.

The stigma attached to the slaughter of the innocents is now covered by the mantra of ‘choice’. It is, we are told, a woman’s right to choose, as though, clever thing, she got pregnant all by herself; the man has no ‘rights’, the baby has no ‘rights’. We don’t allow a woman to get someone to help her die, and if she decides to starve herself to death, or to harm herself, we do not allow her the ‘right’ to choose to do these things; but we do allow her the right to kill the baby in her womb.

We seem to have created a world where pregnancy, the most natural consequence of sexual activity between a man and a woman (yes, sorry for the advocates of equality, but Adam and Steve still can’t actually produce a child by their sexual acts, go complain to God) can be regarded as a ‘punishment’ by the President of the United States. It gets in the way of a woman’s career. At what point in our civilization did a job become more important than children and a family? Mrs S worked part-time through most of the years we were bringing up our family. She did so because she wanted to ‘keep her hand in’ as a nurse. She enjoyed her job, but she also enjoyed bringing up the children we chose to have. We both of us chose to make whatever sacrifices of our time and selfish preferences necessary to do the real job we had been set – bringing up the children. Yes, it meant that there were all sorts of hedonistic things we could not do, but having made one choice  – to have the family the Lord blessed us with, we made the choice to go with its consequences; the joys (and sorrows) have been beyond compare, and I shudder to think of the sorts of people we might have dwindled into had we opted for the selfish side of life.

We do not allow women, or indeed men, total liberty about what they do with their bodies, so it is an Orwellian lie to claim that by allowing women to kill their baby in the womb we are ‘pro-choice’. We aren’t, we are pro-death. As a society we are so in thrall to our self-love that we embrace sterility: if we have sexual intercourse, let us ensure it is closed to life by making it homosexual or sterile if heterosexual; and should it produce life, let us snuff it out. All in the name of ‘choice’? I guess the one comfort is that those who believe in this stuff are on the road to genetic extinction; perhaps Darwinian natural selection is at work here, and future generations of children whose parents chose to let them live will look back and wonder what happened to that other species?