After all, British surveys of public attitudes show that believers believe women should have the same right to choose an abortion as non-religious people. While a study, carried out by YouGov and MSI Reproductive Choices UK, previously found nine out of 10 UK adults believe women should be able to access abortion services in Britain and specifically identify as ‘pro-choice’. In other words, the vast majority of British people believe in a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body, even if they may be personally anti-abortion. But anti-abortion activists take a very different approach. instead using a wide range of tactics to try to prevent women from having abortions. Many resort to forceful, aggressive strategies, such as yelling “mom” or “murderer” at women accessing clinics, as well as handing out medically incorrect leaflets and following women on the street. And the problem of protesters targeting women outside abortion clinics is widespread — with more than 100,000 women going to clinics targeted by anti-abortion protests in 2019. However, the anti-abortion movement is made up of a number of organizations that hold different beliefs and adopt different tactics. The anti-abortion movement in the UK can be divided into two main categories. The first are Catholic groups and the second are evangelical Protestant groups, with each faction adopting very different campaigning approaches. “More and more protests in the face are organized by evangelical Protestants,” Rachael Clarke, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), the UK’s largest abortion provider, tells the Independent. “They stand outside clinics with placards, often have chalkboards or a microphone attached to their head, call women ‘murderers’, use graphic imagery.” Ms Clarke explained that these organizations support an absolutist interpretation of the Bible – adding that they list themselves as abolitionists. “What they mean is that they are against all abortions at any stage for any reason – including if there is a risk to the woman’s life if she continues her pregnancy,” he adds. The activist noted that he opposes so-called “heartbeat bills,” an already extreme form of legislation popular in some US states that prohibits terminating a pregnancy once cardiac activity is detected. This can happen around six weeks into pregnancy, a point at which many women don’t even know they’re pregnant since it’s only two weeks after missing a period. While, doctors warn that this view is incorrect, saying that the fetuses do not have a developed heart at this point. Campaigners against the ‘heartbeat bills’ are challenging the legislation as they believe abortion should be banned from conception, Ms Clarke explains. “They often wear body cameras,” he adds. “It’s creepy that they have cameras. What women who access abortion clinics feel is that they are being filmed while accessing health care.’ Ms Clarke noted that the tactics adopted by anti-abortion campaigners who are Catholic are more “insidious” – adding that this often includes following women seeking abortions in down-the-street clinics, referring to them as ‘mum’, talking about their baby and give the rosaries. “They are perpetrating the lie that abortions cause breast cancer,” she adds. “Although they believe that abortion as a whole is wrong, they are aware of how unusual it is with society as a whole.” The activist said the two branches of anti-abortion activism don’t like each other very well, as she explained in her experience, they don’t mix. But Ms Clarke concluded that the divergent tactics used by various anti-abortion campaigners all have one thing in common: the fact that they are “incredibly painful” for abortion seekers. The pro-life movement is associated with those who are against sex education, with the “war on vigilantism,” with being against gay marriage. It is a web where everything is connected. Rachel Clarke Ms Clarke argued that anti-abortion activism in the UK was characterized by a “cycle of recruitment and radicalisation” outside the clinics. Activists will convince a woman outside a clinic not to have access to an abortion, and then have those women campaign to prevent other women from getting terminations, she said. “These female recruits are vulnerable,” adds Ms Clarke. “Not just because of the situation they’re in, but because they’ve been taken away from an established clinical pathway with trained mental health support and are essentially being pulled over by strangers on the side of the road.” Ms Clarke said large sections of the anti-abortion movement opposed sex education, as she warned they were against sex outside of marriage – adding that they believed the purpose of sex was to have children, not for pleasure. “The pro-life movement is associated with those who are against sex education, with the ‘war on vigilantism,’ with being against gay marriage,” he muses. “It’s a web where everything is connected. They work their way into different parts of the conversation, redefining their brand. It’s a new name and a new campaign but the same people. Some of them do not believe in routine contraception and do not believe in abortion. It’s hard to say how many are against contraception – more people are against emergency contraception than condoms.’ Ms Clarke said she believed the majority of anti-abortion campaigners in the UK opposed abortion in cases of rape, incest, a fatal fetal abnormality or if the pregnancy endangered the woman’s life – with Dr Pam Lowe, a sociologist who specializes in anti-abortion activism in the UK, also believing that this is happening. “Most anti-abortion campaigners in the UK do not believe in abortion in cases of rape, incest, a fatal fetal abnormality or if the woman’s life is at risk,” adds Dr Lowe, senior lecturer in sociology and politics at Aston University. . “It’s basically a total ban. In their worldview, abortion is pretty much the worst thing you can do as a woman, they believe it has a fundamental impact on women’s mental and physical health, and so they argue that rape is not so bad.’ While some anti-abortion campaigners see rape survivors having abortions as almost tantamount to a second rape, she adds. An Appendix to the Ealing Council Consultation Report, referred to in Dr Lowe’s book Anti-Abortion Activism in UK, sheds light on this issue. “I accompanied a friend to the clinic who had been raped and got pregnant,” says a local resident, from Ealing in West London, quoted in the report. “One woman approached her with a model fetus, saying my friend had ‘no options but to kill her baby.’ My friend was very upset and said she was in a hurry. The woman then said it was “very sad, but it wasn’t the baby’s fault”. Dr Lowe argued that banning abortion in cases where a woman’s life is at risk is “beyond cruel”, adding that abortion should be considered a human right as without it “you can die” from health complications. A recent example of this involved an American woman on holiday in Malta who saw doctors refuse to give her a potentially life-saving abortion despite being told her baby had “zero chance” of survival after she had to go to hospital with severe bleeding while she she was 16 weeks pregnant. Malta has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the world – with illegal terminations in all contexts. Dr Lowe explained that some very religious anti-abortion activists see abortion as being associated with the devil or as an example of child sacrifice. For example, Wilfred Wong, one of the directors of the UK’s Center for Bioethical Reform, states that Satanists are associated with “the abortion agenda, the LGBT agenda, they are involved in sex education”, as well as the claim of Islam and Satanism have a common goal, “which is the destruction of Christianity.” Dr. Lowe also noted that evangelical Protestant activists regularly compare abortion to the Holocaust, in which 17 million Jews and others were brutally murdered under the Nazi regime. Including Roma and Sindi, blacks, LGBT+ people, people with disabilities, Slavs, communists and other political opponents. Turning her attention to the issue of birth control in the anti-abortion movement, she said a significant proportion of anti-abortion campaigners in the UK would be opposed to birth control, arguing that almost all conservative Catholics in the anti-abortion movement would be against birth control. Her comments come after campaigners and academics told The Independent UK last week that anti-abortion campaigners have been “emboldened” by the recent decision to scrap the legal right to abortion in the US. They warned that US funding received by British groups was likely to “increase” in the wake of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade – the landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 – last month. More than half of US states are expected to ban abortions or severely restrict policies after the decision, with some states set to ban abortions even when a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. The issue of anti-abortion activism in the UK has led campaigners to long call for the government to create buffer zones outside abortion clinics nationwide. A neutral zone stops anti-abortion protesters or any other type of protesters standing outside or near the clinic. The government rejected calls for…
