Write for Life: William Wilberforce and the Pro-Life Movement

By Courtenay October 25, 2021 Good and Great Books

This post was originally published in October of 2022. The following year saw substantial alterations to abortion regulations in the United States, slightly altering the context into which the post was written. However, SAW Publishing feels that the content remains relevant, as the pro-life movement continues to be one of the controversial battle grounds of our generation.

Of course, on the surface, William Wilberforce and the pro-life movement aren’t too closely connected. Certainly, when I sat down to read Henry James Nicoll’s Great Movements and Those Who Achieved Them I wasn’t expecting the direct outcome to be a pro-life post, in a pro-life tour, highlighting the release of two pro-life novels.

As a matter of fact, if I’m perfectly honest, although I’ve always been pro-life in a theoretical sense, up until this past spring I was a distinctly pessimistic and unbelieving pro-life supporter. Plainly put, I believed abortion should be illegal—and I did not believe it would be.

Pro-Life: Too Much to Ask?

That was essentially my viewpoint. You can’t ask Christian values of a 21^st century world. You’re just not going to get them. The world is going from bad to worse. What makes you think ANYBODY is going to carry the pro-life movement—or any other movement that’s an outcome of traditional Christian values—through to national success?

Deep down, in a tiny corner of my heart, part of this argument wasn’t resonating. The logic might be faultless, but there was one objection standing in the way. People have overthrown evil before. How did they do it? And why?

William Wilberforce: What Does it Take to Change?

This was the question that brought me to Wilberforce’s life. I knew that William Wilberforce had abolished first the salve trade—then slavery itself—in the most powerful nation of his day, at a cost of £20 million (the equivalent of roughly £2.4 billion, or a little over $3.4 billion USD, today).

I was reading his biography to answer one question: why? What did Wilberforce believe that I didn’t? Why did he succeed at a crusade I wouldn’t have bothered starting?

Because Wilberforce didn’t live in a perfect world. We can romanticise the past—we can say it was a better place than in is today. We can say that the Christian worldview dominated to an extent it no longer does. At the end of the day, pre-Victorian Britain was still not a paradise. It was to a great extent, both spiritually and temporally, a corrupt, self-indulgent, humanistic world. BUT—and this but counts for a good deal—it was a world that abolished slavery. A world that abolished slavery because Christians believed that it should.

The Pro-Life Movement: Is It A Fight We Can Win?

We live in a corrupt, self-indulgent, humanistic world. The very fact that we have let abortion become and remain a legal choice, is a proof that our society is openly embracing evil.

But then, wasn’t 19^th century slavery a proof of that, too?

William Wilberforce has changed my perspective on the pro-life movement, because he has shown me that evil can be overcome. It has been overcome before. It can be overcome again. Two centuries ago, a Western world without slavery looked like an impossible dream.

It wasn’t.

Do you have the courage—do I have the courage—does Christendom have the courage—to believe that two centuries from today, it could be possible to say the same about abortion?

Pro-Life is Possible!

That’s what I’m here to say, today. I joined this tour because William Wilberforce convinced me that a pro-life world is possible—and I want to do my part in encouraging each one of you to do your part, to protect the precious lives of unborn babies around the globe. They matter! Life matters! And with God on our side, life is going to win!

Don’t forget to check out all the other pro-life posts in this tour, as we celebrate the release of Sustainer’s Smile by Erika Mathews and To Save A Life by R. M. Peterson.