Having recently celebrated the life and work of William Wilberforce, some religious leaders have called abortion-on-demand the 'new slavery'; the human rights issue that will define our generation's place in history.

|PIC1|It is forty years since abortion became legal in Britain.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has warned that abortion is increasingly being seen as the easy option for women, perhaps just another form of contraception. In the process, he says, British people risk losing sight of the sanctity of life.

This last statement is supported by the fact that some notable supporters of a lower legal age limit for abortion are also vocal campaigners for voluntary euthanasia.

In 1967, when the act legalising abortion was passed, says Dr. Williams, 'what people might now call their "default position" was still that abortion was a profoundly undesirable thing and that a universal presumption of care for the foetus from the moment of conception was the norm.'

'There has been an obvious weakening of the feeling that abortion is a last resort in cases of extreme danger or distress. Nearly 200,000 abortions a year in England and Wales tell their own story. We are not now dealing with a relatively small number of extreme cases.'

Recently, several British newspapers carried stories of babies who were aborted for nothing more than having club feet or cleft lips or palates - minor disabilities which can be corrected with surgery after birth.

In an age where people love to jump on the high horse of this human rights issue or that, surely we should defend the rights of the most fragile among us, the truly voiceless in our midst.

We talk about human rights, but where is the right in this: we kill unborn babies while we fight to save forest trees?

Western societies are, for the most part, more violent than they were four decades ago. In the end, abortion as we now know it is about violence; it may be the ultimate form of bullying.

The pro-abortion-on-demand stance is an important one to several groups of people. First of all, to those women who might not want a baby or who feel emotionally or financially ill-equipped for motherhood.

I seriously doubt that any caring person would want to see a return to the days when single mothers were ostracised and condemned by society at large. People of faith will certainly agree, as it was Christ who taught us to love the marginalised and the hurting.

This love must be more than an intellectual assent to the idea of caring - it must involve practical assistance. But showing compassion does not mean staying silent when speaking up might save someone from wrongdoing and pain. There is such a thing as 'speaking the truth in love'.

The pro-abortion-on-demand position is also important to radical women's rights movements, who argue that abortion is purely an issue of women's rights.

As is often the case, liberal radicals are quick to demonize those who don't completely agree with their agenda, saying that those who would reappraise abortion-on-demand are 'anti-women'.

In actual fact, there is good evidence to show that being anti-abortion may in many cases be the more pro-woman stance.

Pro-abortionists like to talk about freedom of choice, but they rarely tell the truth about the after-affects of abortion: either the physical complications that can arise, or the mother's sense of emotional loss and grief which can take many years to come to terms with.

Thank God, the message of Christianity is that through Christ even that pain can be healed over time - though the memory doubtless remains, with support and love people can be given closure.

A final group for whom a pro-abortion position is important are certain medical researchers.

We should be thankful for the wonderful work done by scientists in many fields. But some bio-researchers are hopeful that they will be able to harvest aborted foetal cells in all kinds of studies and operations.

Of course, not everyone in the scientific community is in favour. Some scientists openly question where this might take us next - perhaps experimentation on the comatose, or the dying.

One point cries out to be made here: even if research were a good reason for abortion, there are far more abortions carried out right now than could ever be justified on that basis.

The big question for us is this: is an embryo or foetus a human being? There are basically five views on this -- and each of us must make our choice from these options.

You may choose to believe that the embryo or foetus is nothing more than a growth inside the mother's womb, a collection of cells. Alternatively, you may believe that the embryo or foetus becomes human somewhere between conception and birth. This one is tricky: where do we draw the line, and for what reasons?

A third option is the idea that the embryo becomes a person only after it reaches viability, the time when the foetus can survive on its own.

A number of studies have shown, however, that unborn children exhibit many truly human traits long before they're ready to live unaided.

Some people choose to believe that birth itself is the crucial moment when personhood begins. But how can we justify giving a baby a completely different right-to-life status five minutes before it is born, or even one minute before?

Our final option is that the embryo has been human all along, right from the time it was first conceived. If that's the case, the embryo has had inviolable rights from conception.

This latter option is the one supported by most conservative scholars in the reading of the Bible and other major religious texts.

In biblical terms, the embryo is like the seed of a tree -- it isn't yet all that it will become, but it contains everything needed to get there. It is not just a 'potential' human being -- it is human.

But there's more to it even than that. The scriptures teach that we should treat the embryo as a person because it is known and loved by God -- it is a human being for which he has very special plans. There are several examples in the Bible narrative of people whose future was announced before they were even conceived - Samson, John the Baptist and Jesus Christ among them.

If a baby is valuable to God before it is even conceived -- because he knows what it will grow to become -- how can it be of lesser value afterwards?

When is an embryo human? The Bible's answer is: right from the start!

Is it possible that one day, a few hundred years hence, people will look back and thank God that humanity gave up on abortion, just as it did on slavery? And that Christians were at the forefront of that change? We should all hope so.

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Mal Fletcher is the Founder and Director of Next Wave International. Next Wave International™ is a Christian mission to contemporary cultures with a special focus on Europe.

For many other resources by Mal, including streaming audio & video, e-Books and more, go to www.nextwaveonline.com