Christians from countries that are safely pro-life at the moment cannot presume they will stay that way, pro-life campaigner Dr Calum Miller has said.
Dr Miller, an apologist and research fellow in bioethics at the University of Oxford, delivered a sobering assessment of the enormous strides made by the abortion movement globally in the last few decades in an address to the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) general assembly meeting in South Korea this week.
He warned that even in countries that are socially conservative or majority Christian, attitudes are rapidly changing. One example of this is the Philippines where research on young people that he was involved in last year found that 70% of young people support legalising abortion.
In the 11 years between the WEA’s 2008 general assembly in Thailand and its following global gathering in Indonesia in 2019, he noted that some 27 countries had liberalised their abortion laws.
One of them was Ireland where, in 2013, only a third of the population said they supported abortion. Just five years later, two thirds of the population voted to legalise it, including 85% of young people.
“This rapid generational shift is coming for the Global South as well,” he said, warning that the liberalising trend was spreading at a “frightening pace in every region across the world”.
“You might think that your country is a strongly conservative, Christian country but the likely reality is that millions of dollars are pouring into your country to pressure your legislators and your young people to promote abortion,” he said.
Just some of the countries under pressure to loosen their abortion laws are Nigeria, Poland, Chile, Brazil, Haiti and Liberia.
The WEA’s general assembly is taking place across five days at SaRang Church in the South Korean capital of Seoul. Dr Miller said it was sobering to meet in the country with the lowest birth rate in the world and at a time when its legislators are pushing for the legalisation of abortion up to birth.
“Whether you live in the most conservative or the most liberal country in the world, this is something that will destroy the future of all of our countries,” he said.
“Outside of Africa and the Pacific Islands, almost no countries have enough children even to survive.”
He said he was praying that evangelicals would work together towards “a profound moment of change, a moment for the people of God to choose life not only in our own lives and in our churches but for our nations as well”.
