Bob, Jim: actually, I wasn’t quite as surprised as I thought I might be. Depressed, but not all that surprised.

However, the position in the UK is rather different. For starters, our abortion rate is much lower than in the US (though still appallingly high: around 190,000 a year), and studies have indicated that abortion is more common in affluent areas than in areas of deprivation. There is little or no correlation between abortion rates and ethnicity, once deprivation is taken into account. (Source: pp. 10ff. of this 2004 report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (PDF).)

That certainly fits with my (unscientific and limited) perception of the situation. If you come to the UK, if you see a teenage mother pushing a pram then she will almost certainly come from a lower-income bracket (and in the places where I live and work, it’s equally likely she’ll be white). As a general rule, “nice middle-class girls” don’t have babies. There’s a reason for that.

This then leads to an interesting question: why (speaking in wild generalities) do poor women in the US abort their babies, while poor women in the UK give birth to them?

Michael: I am as unimpressed by the Roman Catholic sheep-stealing apologetics movement as anyone else. But the argument of that RefCath post seems to be, “Catholic apologetics is a really bad thing, therefore Protestants should be doing it as well”.

The reason why evangelicals don’t generally engage in “Protestant apologetics” directed toward Roman Catholics is simple: those evangelicals who might be minded to do so tend to see RCs as non-Christians in need of evangelism, rather than as “separated brethren” who need to join the True Church®.

Plus, RC apologists are just responding to a market need. If large swathes of evangelicalism weren’t so spiritually dessicated, the message of the RC apologists wouldn’t have such traction for a certain type of frustrated evangelical.