(LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this month, Belgian Justice Minister Annelies Verlinden proposed loosening Belgium’s abortion laws, extending the legal limit from 12 weeks to 14 weeks, reducing the mandatory “reflection period” from six days to two, and permitting abortion in cases of sexual assault up to 18 weeks. Verlinden described her proposed law to expand the abortion regime as a “compromise,” and stated that 14 weeks was as far as she would go. The opposition party, Groen, stated that this does not go far enough. According to the Brussels Times:

Groen’s parliamentary leader, Stefaan Van Hecke, has dismissed the proposal as inadequate. He referred to an April 2023 report from a panel of experts that recommended extending the limit to 18 weeks. ‘This is just the same outdated CD&V stance, which is completely disconnected from scientific consensus and the parliamentary majority,’ Van Hecke said.

Something approximating the opposite is true. At 18 weeks, a baby in the womb stretches, wriggles, flexes her arms and legs, yawns, hiccups, sucks its thumb or fingers, and can grasp the umbilical cord with all five fingers. She can make facial expressions and—a fact that should be relevant to abortion activists but is not—she can feel pain.

Abortion activists have been pushing Belgium to loosen its abortion laws for some time. Amnesty International, a pro-abortion NGO, went so far as to cite Belgium’s liberal abortion-on-demand regime as a “concern” because it didn’t go far enough in their 2025 human rights report. Belgium had previously liberalized abortion laws in 2018, removing it from the criminal code and easing the “mandatory distress” requirement.

Even as we have learned more about babies in the womb, European countries have pushed in the opposite direction. In 2019, North Macedonia increased the abortion limit from 10 weeks to 12. France expanded its abortion regime from 12 weeks to 14 in 2022, and then enshrined abortion in the constitution in 2024. Finland removed barriers to abortion to create an on-demand regime up to 12 weeks in 2023. Denmark and Norway expanded abortion-on-demand from 12 weeks to 18 in 2025. Luxembourg enshrined abortion in the constitution this year.

For decades, some optimistic pro-lifers made the argument that the twin trends of increasingly revelatory ultrasound technology and the tech-enabled viability of preemie babies being pushed younger and younger would inevitably push abortion laws back. The law would keep up with science and technology; as we could save lives younger and witness human life at its earliest stages, the fundamental truth of the pro-life argument would become obvious.

Tragically, that prophecy has not come to pass. Abortion activists do not care that human life begins at conception. They do not care if the children being targeted by abortion can feel pain. They do not even care if the children being killed in the womb could survive outside of the womb, if only given the chance. Pro-lifers are calling for science-based public policy; abortion activists are insisting that scientific consensus supports their feticide-for-all ambitions while ignoring the baby in the womb entirely.

Abortion is the bloody foundation upon which the sexual revolution rests, and the society they have built sits on a mass grave.