Life After Death

President of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, and head of the Department of Child Health at Glasgow University, pointed to the more distant relationship between working mothers and their bottle-fed, child-minded babies, and the development of a potential for emotional and behavioural problems later: "A mother breast-feeding with a supportive family structure around her, that is the way the human species has evolved. The changes happening now are not good," he says. Professor Cockburn also criticises the UK's arrangements for women in the first year of a baby's life which he describes as "primitive", calling for women to be able to spend a longer time with their child after birth: one or two years. In an earlier age, the phrase 'working mother' would have meant what it said recognising the importance for a child of having their mother and their father to turn to.

By contrast, in 1998, the Government embarked on a strategy of forcing single parents into work outside the home, the creation of more child-minding, and of leaving more children with no parents for most of the time. The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Times (29.8.94.) pleaded for children to be delivered from "a sense of hopelessness and despair". He also had this to say: "If you were to walk tonight along Golders Green Road, you would see hundreds of Jewish children, good children, standing around aimlessly, some on drink, some on drugs, having everything but believing nothing". And where does all this begin? It begins when a society loses a respect for life. When life is accorded such scant respect in the womb, is it any wonder that life is shown so little respect after birth?

Dispense with belief and with what are you left?

Does Society need Religious Belief?

It is instructive to consider how society is getting along without religious belief.

The dissolution of civic society - what David Selborne in The Principle of Duty (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) described as "the process of civic disaggregation" - can be traced to the abandonment of the absolute principles proclaimed in the Decalogue, to a discarding of the sanctity of human life. The love of God and the love of others, the disavowal of killing, truthfulness, faithfulness, respect for the property of others: these basic goods have been at the core of our civic order. Take away the belief on which those values turn and you are left with a jumble of competing claims and notions. In turn this creates a sense of crisis - not the stability for which most people yearn. From Will Hutton's The State We're In (Jonathan Cape 1992), to Anthony Sampson's The Essential Anatomy of Britain (Hodder & Stoughton 1992) which was sub-titled "Democracy in Crisis", the very titles of secular commentaries admit this sense of uncertainty and chaos.

In recognising the scale of civic disaggregation, commentators generally do not like the uncomfortable conclusion that social reform must begin in personal reform; that social sins are no more than personal sins writ large. The failure of successive governments to tackle unprecedented levels of crime, for instance, is