A UK-BASED anti-choice group that gives talks to schoolchildren about what it calls “coerced abortion” is receiving thousands of dollars from anonymous American donors.
According to VICE World News, nearly £73,000 (91,885 US dollars) has been anonymously paid to the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child’s (SPUC) through an agency called NPT Transatlantic over the last two years. The agency facilitates donations across the Atlantic without donors having to reveal their names and or qualify for any tax deduction.
This is thought to be the first time that a donation from a US donor to a British anti-abortion group has been revealed.
While experts have known that funding may have been taking place for some time, a number of activist groups have set up shell charities or companies to disguise the direction and origin of the money. Another possibility is that support has been targeted at specific individuals, which VICE World News says was the case for the recent protest outside of a Scottish abortion clinic.
The SPUC’s accounts reveal that it used donations to teach primary school children about foetal development and to organise a conference “aimed at medics to help them understand the tell-tale signs of coercive control from partners, sex traffickers, parents etc who may force a woman/girl to have an abortion against her will” and to “train medics to recognise and prevent cases of coerced abortion.”
Rachael Clarke from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service said the donations were “deliberately obfuscated and shadowy” and that the group’s agenda “dangerously blurs the lines between value judgement and social and clinical reality.”
Ruth Wareham, education policy researcher at Humanists UK, said: "Any external organisation delivering Relationships and Sex Education [RSE] in schools ought to be doing so in a factually accurate, balanced manner, not using it as a vehicle to spread harmful, ideologically driven anti-abortion messages.
“The fact that SPUC is disingenuously trying to link their agenda to the very real problems of sexual coercion, abuse, and trafficking is particularly alarming. It also flies in the face of Government guidance which says that RSE teaching resources must be evidence-based and feature robust facts and statistics.”
And an email sent to a teacher showed that SPUC would be putting on a play at the Edinburgh Fringe about “coercion and sexting”.
It was reported that all of the SPUC’s upcoming shows in the summer are about abortion. However, the Edinburgh Fringe confirmed that their listings from the group had no mention of the word.
And last month the SPUC organised two days of talks with Edinburgh medical professionals, where medics hears from anti-choice speakers. One of those was a midwife who lost a 2014 Supreme Court Case which found that she did not have the right to avoid supervising other nurses involved in abortion procedures.
A spokesperson for NPT Transatlantic said: “NPT Transatlantic donors recommend grants that support a variety of organizations, all in good standing with the IRS or the Charity Commission of England and Wales (as applicable), which may be on differing sides of a cause.
“NPT Transatlantic does not take a position on which causes our donors support, however we carefully follow strict due diligence procedures to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
