Christians from countries which are safely pro-life for the time being cannot presume they are going to stay that way, pro-life campaigner Dr Calum Miller has said.
Dr Miller, an apologist and research fellow in bioethics on the University of Oxford, delivered a sobering assessment of the large strides made by the abortion movement globally in the previous couple of a long time in an address to the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) general assembly meeting in South Korea this week.
He warned that even in countries which are socially conservative or majority Christian, attitudes are rapidly changing. One example of that is the Philippines where research on young those who he was involved in last 12 months 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 3rd 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 the world over”.
“You might think that your country is a strongly conservative, Christian country however the likely reality is that hundreds of thousands of dollars are pouring into your country to pressure your legislators and your young people to advertise abortion,” he said.
Just among the countries under pressure to loosen their abortion laws are Nigeria, Poland, Chile, Brazil, Haiti and Liberia.
The WEA’s general assembly is going down across five days at SaRang Church within the South Korean capital of Seoul. Dr Miller said it was sobering to satisfy within the country with the bottom birth rate on the earth and at a time when its legislators are pushing for the legalisation of abortion as much as birth.
“Whether you reside in essentially the most conservative or essentially the most liberal country on the earth, that is something that may destroy the longer term 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 decide on life not only in our own lives and in our churches but for our nations as well”.
