"We should never normalise abortion"

This speech was given by FVD MP Pepijn van Houwelingen in Dutch parliament on the 25th of May, 2023.

President,

Every abortion is a tragedy. A budding life, human life moreover, is not given the chance to reach maturity but is, in a sense literally, nipped in the bud. And that is tragic. Not only for the unborn life itself, but also for the mother, who carries the baby in her body, and the father, who will never see his son or daughter grow up. Abortion is something we as a society should want to prevent as much as possible. 

Currently, abortion is in the Penal Code, but the Termination of Pregnancy Act does allow a doctor to perform an abortion under certain circumstances. The initiators of the citizens' initiative we are discussing today want to remove abortion from the Penal Code and treat it as a normal medical procedure. Forum for Democracy is against that.

Although always a tragedy, in our view there are circumstances where an abortion is conceivable. For example, when the life of the child or the mother is at risk, or in the case of a rape. A rape of which, incidentally, the unborn life itself is of course innocent. That is the moral dilemma.

We can discuss when abortion is acceptable or not, but in any case it is not a normal medical act. After all, it is not, like medical care, aimed at protecting, but at ending life. Human life, especially unborn life, which is most vulnerable and defenceless, should be protected. So, as far as we are concerned, abortion belongs in the Penal Code.

In our opinion, this citizens' initiative fits well into the current zeitgeist, which seems to be aimed at normalising abortion. Not the value of (unborn) life, but the freedom of choice of the individual and the social engineering of life are central. Hence, an initiative bill was recently passed in this House to abolish the mandatory five-day reflection period for abortion. When buying a house, the buyer gets a legal three-day cooling-off period, but unborn life is apparently not even worth a day's consideration. What does this say about how much we value unborn life?

The embryo law that will soon be debated in this Chamber also fits into this zeitgeist. This law allows embryos, i.e. human life, to be created for the sole purpose of then conducting experiments on them. Once the excel sheets are filled with data, the embryos are discarded. 

In other words, human life is hereby completely instrumentalised, stripped of its intrinsic value and thus, in our eyes, dehumanised. It is a logical outgrowth of transhumanism, an ideology popular among globalists. An ideology that, taken at face value, conceptualises human life as a kind of bundle of atoms, without free will or intrinsic value. A pile of cells that is infinitely malleable and, moreover, can and must be improved.

To such a Brave New World we are, I fear, on our way. A world in which human life is supposed to be completely malleable and malleable. A world in which human life itself is a product that can be made, improved and discarded. A world where nothing is sacred anymore and there are no boundaries to be respected. A world in which human beings create themselves. It is hubris, chairman. It is the tower of Babel in a new guise. It is godless and I say this, chairman, as a member of a secular party. 

This citizens' initiative is another step in this wrong direction. Removing abortion from the Penal Code will further normalise abortion and thus inevitably further detract from the intrinsic value of life itself. Let us avoid that.