The Unravelling of Legal Protection for the Unborn in Britain
The recent intervention by Stephen Conway, Bishop of Lincoln, during debate on Clause 191 of the Crime and Sentencing Bill in the House of Lords, exemplifies a recurring ecclesial error in contemporary public theology: the attempt to preserve morally desirable outcomes while surrendering the juridical and metaphysical foundations upon which those outcomes depend.
Clause 191 proposes to remove women entirely from the scope of criminal liability in relation to abortion, including abortions procured beyond the 24-week limit established under the Abortion Act 1967. In doing so, it disapplies sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, as well as the Infant Life (Preservation) Act 1929, thereby removing legal protection even for unborn children capable of survival outside the womb.¹
The Bishop acknowledged that the Chamber was on “precious ground” and agreed with Baroness Meyer that the clause represented a serious diminution of protection for viable unborn life. Yet his proposed remedy was not the defence of law, but its displacement: a call to “change and invest in better police procedure,” reframing women as witnesses or victims rather than potential offenders, while allowing full legal decriminalisation to stand.
Law Names Reality Before It Punishes
Criminal law does not exist primarily to penalise; it exists to name. It articulates society’s judgement about what is objectively unjust, especially where the taking of human life is concerned. Once an act is removed from the scope of criminal law, it is no longer publicly intelligible as a wrong in any binding sense. What remains is administrative management, not justice.
Police procedure is necessarily derivative. Police do not define crimes; they respond to offences already named by law. To suggest that policing can preserve moral distinctions which the law itself has abolished is to misunderstand both law and policing. Once abortion beyond viability is decriminalised, there is no longer a crime to investigate—only an event to be contextualised.
The Bishop’s proposal thus attempts to retain the effects of moral law while abandoning its form. Compassion is invoked, but moral clarity is evacuated.
From Protection to Power: The Inversion of Justice
Baroness Meyer rightly observed that Clause 191 creates a legal order in which the protection of a viable unborn child depends not on the child’s capacity for life, but on who causes that life to end.² Viability ceases to be morally determinative; relational power takes its place.
Bishop Conway sought to counter this by emphasising the coercion and abuse faced by some women. This concern is legitimate. Yet the argument as advanced establishes an implicit hierarchy of moral visibility: women are concrete moral subjects; unborn children are abstract and negotiable. The law, once stripped of ontological grounding, is reduced to a mechanism for prioritising competing narratives of vulnerability.
A society cannot coherently claim to affirm the sanctity of life while legally rendering its destruction morally neutral when performed by a particular class of agent.
The Church of England’s Structural Ambiguity
The Bishop framed his remarks as consistent with the stated position of the Church of England, which formally opposes late-term abortion of viable foetuses except under limited conditions.³ Yet the logic of his intervention reveals how attenuated that opposition has become. Moral principle is affirmed rhetorically while juridical consequence is relinquished.
This is not an isolated lapse but a structural feature of contemporary Anglican moral reasoning. Ethical claims are increasingly detached from metaphysical assertions about nature and personhood, and re-anchored instead in therapeutic and procedural categories—harm reduction, trauma, safeguarding, and tone. The result is a public theology capable of lamenting injustice while facilitating its legal entrenchment.
A Catholic Contrast
Law, Nature, and the Non-Negotiability of Innocent Life
From a Catholic moral framework, the Bishop of Lincoln’s position is not merely insufficient; it is unintelligible. Catholic moral theology does not treat law as a pragmatic instrument for social management, but as a rational participation in the moral order grounded in nature and ultimately in God.⁴
The direct and intentional killing of innocent human life is intrinsically evil, regardless of circumstance, motive, or agent.⁵ Because this moral truth is objective, it must be reflected in law—not merely in pastoral accompaniment or investigative discretion. To remove an act from criminal law is to declare, publicly and authoritatively, that it is no longer a matter of justice.
Catholic teaching therefore rejects the notion that compassion for women and legal protection for the unborn exist in tension. A legal order that refuses to name the killing of a viable child as a grave injustice ultimately abandons both. Where law dissolves into procedure, the vulnerable are left to the mercy of power rather than protected by truth.
Culpability and compassion may mitigate punishment, but they can never erase moral reality. A woman may be coerced; the child remains a person. Pastoral care addresses the former; law must address the latter. To conflate the two is to confuse mercy with moral amnesia.
Conclusion
Bishop Conway is correct that women subjected to coercion and abuse deserve protection, care, and justice. He is profoundly mistaken in supposing that the erosion of criminal law can coexist with the preservation of moral truth.
A society that decriminalises the destruction of viable human life cannot police its way back to justice. And a Church that accepts this logic—while lamenting its consequences—has already surrendered the moral reasoning it claims to defend.
¹ UK Parliament, Crime and Sentencing Bill, Clause 191; Hansard, House of Lords Debates, 3 February 2026.
² Baroness Meyer, intervention on Clause 191, Hansard, House of Lords, 3 February 2026.
³ Church of England, Abortion: A Response to the Report of the Commission on Human Fertilisation and Embryology; General Synod statements on abortion and late-term viability.
⁴ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1954–1960; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, qq. 91–94.
⁵ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2271; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae (1987).
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