Bring conscience and evidence inside

Exodus 1:17 · Psalm 139:13-16

DRAFT — awaiting editorial review.

The first recorded act of civil disobedience in the Bible was carried out by midwives. Pharaoh told Shiphrah and Puah to kill the Hebrew boys at birth, “but the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them” (Exodus 1:17). God dealt well with them for it. The healing professions have always stood at the place where the state’s demand to kill meets the body of a child, and the question is only which way the person in the room will face.

You know what the rest of us only read: that the child in the scan has a beating heart at a stage the leaflets call a cluster of cells, that the drugs and devices do what the manufacturer’s own data says they do, and that a great deal of the killing happens in forms that never reach a statistic. “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). You have watched it being done.

So the calling is twofold. Conscience: to refuse, courteously and immovably, to take part, and to bear the cost. Evidence: to bring what you see into the open with the precision your training gives you, so that abolitionists outside the profession never say more than the evidence bears. Half the strength of this movement’s case rests on people like you being exact.

A first conversation with us is confidential, and nothing is ever published without your written consent. Begin here.

First, as everyone

Pray Sign the Declaration Write to your church Email your MP Give

Then, your part

Know the evidence
Read what the mechanisms are and what the sources say, so that nothing you tell a patient or a colleague is overstated.
Learn a prudent habit of speech
How to say what is true inside a profession that punishes saying it badly.
Train on the case concerning IVF
Many of the children lost are lost in fertility clinics; learn to see and speak about it.
Tell us in confidence what you see
A first contact is confidential and commits you to nothing.

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