Despite the public outcry over Letby’s crimes, we are still paying doctors to dispose of tiny lives
On 24 August, Lucy Letby became the fourth woman in UK history to be sentenced to a whole life term for apparently committing the most appalling crimes against tiny children.
However, let’s contrast the media’s treatment of Letby and the recently exonerated Carla Foster, who used tablets to abort her unborn child after the legal limit.
Why are the media happy to depict Lucy Letby as a moral monster, yet present Carla Foster as a victim of the system, a woman who was unjustly sentenced – so the argument goes – under outdated laws?
If Foster’s actions were illegal because her baby was 32 weeks old, why are they legal if her baby had been 22 weeks old?
The Letby case is well known: seven premature babies killed and six more attempted murders between June 2015 and June 2016. The dependence and vulnerability of these babies is what made their destruction, by poisons or physical assault, so disturbing.
But the universal condemnation of Letby’s actions has not extended to Carla Foster’s decision to kill her own child through deliberately administrating poison in the form of abortion pills. Lily Foster was a minimum of 32 weeks old when she was killed – a similar age to, and likely older than, some of Letby’s victims. Lily would have been born healthily just a few weeks later had her life not been cruelly curtailed.
The irony is as stark as it is tragic. Equally so is our culture’s blindness to this inconsistency, or maybe it’s a determination not to look.
Perhaps, hidden deep within the nation’s collective conscience is a recognition: the actions of Carla Foster are not so different to those of Lucy Letby. The only difference in Foster’s case was the passage of some ten weeks.
Foster’s case raises the question of why the destruction of a child remains legally acceptable up to the arbitrary 24-week age limit. Furthermore, if one can get away with killing a child at 32 weeks (as Foster did), why not at 40 weeks, why not in fact once the child is born? Which is precisely what Letby did.
Contrarily, if Foster’s actions were illegal (and unacceptable) because her baby was 32 weeks old, why are they legal if her baby had been 22 weeks old?
Foster’s acquittal shines a light on the whole abortion industry and everything that supports it: taxpayer finance; the NHS; a worldview that ignores God and despises biblical ethics. Infanticide is carried out by medical practitioners on an industrial scale and celebrated within our society.
Letby’s crimes were appalling, but she was far from being the most prolific serial killer of children in modern British history. That unholy accolade is shared by every abortion provider in the country.
People of God, you must decide; will you speak the truth or will you choose to remain silent while a genocide against our nation’s children continues?
Tim Lewis
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Tim Lewis is the church network and theology lead for Brephos, CBRUK’s project helping churches to respond to abortion (www.brephos.org).
No-one voted for 10 million lives to be lost
We are paying the price for the missing generations
October 2023 marks the 55th anniversary of the first legalised abortions. Over 10 million lives have been lost since then.
It was back in 1967 that a male-dominated House of Commons voted on David Steel’s Private Member’s Bill to legalise abortion if the mother’s life was in danger, hoping to prevent further back-street abortions taking place.
But no-one voted for 10 million lives to be lost. That was never in any party’s manifesto.
According to a ComRes poll dated 2018:
- Only 1% of the UK population want the abortion time limit raised to birth.
- 70% of women would like the abortion time lowered.
- 59% of women would like the abortion time limit lowered to 16 weeks or less.
- 93% of women want independent abortion counselling introduced.
- 91% of women want an explicit sex-selective abortion ban.
- 79% of the population want a fiveday consideration period before abortion.
- 76% of the population want introduction of doctors to verify that women are not coerced.
- 70% of parents want introduction of parental consent for girls 15 and under to get abortions.
Now we are paying the price: 10+ million taxpayers and NI contributors who could have formed our workforce; figures from the ONS show that the average extra NI contribution is £20 per month to make up for the lost generations.
Nor let’s forget abortion’s effects, both psychological and physical, suffered by women and girls, leading to increased pressure on our NHS.
Happily, there is hope: each September pro-life groups march through London and hold demonstrations.
The ComRes poll demonstrates that in a democracy you have to trust the people.
Ashley Dickenson
Carshalton,