This month, South Carolina Republicans have taken the repeal of Roe v Wade to its most extreme conclusion and are drafting a bill to make abortion punishable by life imprisonment or even death. It may well be a largely performative gesture, but the very fact that abortion has been linked with the death penalty by lawmakers legitimises the association increasingly being drawn in the US between the medical procedure and homicide.
Christian conservatives in the US score a landmark victory
Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling in 1973 stating that the US constitution protected a woman’s liberty to decide if she wished to terminate a pregnancy, was overturned last year by the US supreme court. Six out of the nine current justices are Republican appointees and are strict Catholic conservatives. Following remarks made by Justice Clarence Thomas that the current court has a “duty to correct the errors” of the past, there are growing concerns that the overturning of Roe v Wade will open the door to similar challenges concerning women’s rights to access contraception and gay marriage.
The reversal of Roe v Wade was not happenstance. It was strategically planned. In 2018, three Mississippi Republicans, senators Angela Hill, Joey Fillinganes and congresswoman Beckie Currie, introduced bills in their respective chambers, identical in content and all titled the Gestational Age Act banning abortion from 15 weeks.
The legislation was drafted for them by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an American conservative Christian legal advocacy group which is opposed to abortion and has litigated to restrict access to contraception. The idea was to impel pro-choice groups to challenge the legislation until it went all the way to the now religiously conservative supreme court. It worked and gave an opening to exceptionally reverse a previous supreme court decision.
It could never happen here…
In some ways it already has.
Abortion is still classed as a criminal act in the UK under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. In 1967 the Abortion Act allowed doctors to provide an abortion if two clinicians decide that the pregnancy would hurt the woman or her family’s physical or mental health more than a termination would. Otherwise, abortion remains a crime in Britain.
Although the medical profession has been lenient in its interpretation of the 1967 law, there appears to be a hardening up of attitudes. Since 2015, 17 women have been investigated by the police for having had abortions and as recently as last year a 25-year-old woman was prosecuted under the 1861 Act in Oxford.
Until recently in Northern Ireland abortion was banned, even in cases of incest and rape, with women facing life imprisonment if they sought a termination. To put what many saw as an anomalous situation right, in 2019 a law to bring Northern Ireland in line with the rest of the United Kingdom was introduced and passed in Westminster. However, a significant number of senior Conservatives voted to keep the ban in place.
Britain bucks the trend
In the shocked aftermath of the reversal of Roe v Wade, countries worldwide sought to cement legal protection for women and their rights over their own bodies. The Indian supreme court extended its abortion laws to cover all women regardless of marital status and the French national assembly voted 337-32 to start the process of enshrining the right to abortion in the French constitution, but in the UK events took a peculiar turn,
Not only did the British government specifically rule out securing abortion rights in any forthcoming British bill of rights, it went one step further.
In its capacity as the 2022 chair of the International Religious Freedom of Belief Alliance, and one month after the US supreme court ruling reversing Roe v Wade, the UK played host to a conference designed to draw up an official statement of gender equality and worked with 22 other countries to agree the wording. Once agreed, 22 countries signed the document only to discover that the UK, under the ministerial hand of Liz Truss, had unilaterally amended the document, with no warning, to remove commitments to abortion and sexual health rights.
The other signatories were so taken aback that 18 of the 22 signatories withdrew their support.
A cynical move by Truss to gain support
Truss’s voting record reveals she tends to support a pro-choice stance, so the question as to why she would amend the international statement in such a way is an obvious one to pose. It could be linked to the fact that at the time of the conference she was courting support in her bid for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
Many of her supporters in parliament, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nadine Dorries, and Thérèse Coffey, are anti-abortion on religious grounds and, as the preferred candidate of American funded think-tanks, she was representing the interests of several big players on the American right such as the Charles Koch and Robert Mercer – both Trumpian in politics and big funders of the anti-abortion movement.
American Christian conservatives set their sights on the UK
The above mentioned International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) was held on 5 and 6 July for which Truss, as foreign secretary, was giving the opening speech. Heavily involved in this forum was the co-chair of the cross party pro-life parliamentary group and Boris Johnson’s special envoy to FoRB, Conservative MP Fiona Bruce.
There was also a side-event titled ‘Advancing International Religious Freedom in the Special Relationship – a Trans-Atlantic Conversation’, hosted by the American Christian group, Religious Freedom Institute (RFI). The group, which does not declare its donors, is described as a religious pressure group linked to anti-abortion and anti-LGBT activities. Thomas Parr, its president, spoke at the event. He is also on the advisory council of the international division of the Alliance Defending Freedom, who, as described above, drafted the legislation which led to the reversal of abortion rights in the US.
Also speaking as one of the RFI’s senior fellows was Conservative MP Rehman Christi. He preceded Fiona Bruce as the British government’s special envoy to FoRB and is now paid £22,400 per year for part time work with the RFI. With its anti-abortion stance openly declared, the RFI wrote a piece stressing its expectations of Truss at the conference. It concluded:
“There is all the potential for the UK to use the ministerial to step up as a leader in the promotion of this foundational freedom, orchestrated by the prime minister’s energetic and determined Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) Fiona Bruce.”
On 7 July the amended declaration, minus references to protecting women’s sexual health rights, was published.
Though Truss came and went with spectacular speed, other senior government figures, including Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Jeremy Hunt and Michelle Donelan as well as a number of backbench Tory MPs, have a record of voting against or abstaining on widening access to abortion services. As an example, more than a third of the cabinet voted against retaining the measure introduced during the pandemic that allows early termination medication to be taken at home.
Keeping the American religious right happy: a pro-lifer in charge of UK abortion care
Despite a lack of enthusiasm for it on government benches, legislation to roll out buffer zones around abortion clinics to protect women from harassment from protesters finally came into force this month.
This has not gone unnoticed on the other side of the pond. Eight members of the United States congress have raised concerns over Britain’s unfair treatment of Christian beliefs. Led by anti-abortion Republican congressman Chip Roy, they believe the UK is on an unsettling path and demand that the US ambassador at large for religious freedom turns his attention to what they perceive to be the worsening treatment of Christians in Britain.
Maybe Sunak hopes that his November appointment of Maria Caulfield as the minister responsible for abortion care in Britain will calm them down.
Caulfield is firmly pro-life and describes herself as the “voice of the unborn”.
