Pro-life campaigners need more patience than William Wilberforce in their struggle to end abortion, the Bishop of Shrewsbury has said. At a conference hosted by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), Bishop Davies said that Wilberforce, an abolitionist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, had for long been “cited in pro-life circles as an example of perseverance in a moral cause”. But it was St John Paul II, the bishop said, who helped him to personally recognise “that the pro-life struggle, whose imminent victory I had at first assumed, might not be such an easy task”. Bishop Davies said: “In this now global struggle, we must be willing to persevere longer than William Wilberforce who saw change in his own lifetime. “We must be ready, like the founding generation of this movement, to win over one person at a time and to make this continuous progress among many setbacks.” He continued: “I do not want us to doubt that we face a sustained struggle in the years ahead simply because of the immensity of what is at stake but to encourage us all to take that step, that action which we can now take.” Bishop Davies went on to say that the 1967 Act, which legalised abortion, was an “evil and misguided law” that had severely undermined the national consensus that human life was sacred, a conviction which originated from Britain’s Christian heritage. The bishop told delegates that “we might rightly fear the vacuum into which destructive ideologies will inevitably enter” as the value of human life is increasingly obscured.