The UK is seeing the “weaponisation of abortion” after anti-abortionists learned from effective tactics in the US over the past decade, a senior Labour backbencher has warned.
Stella Creasey warned she has personally seen the agenda of American anti-abortion groups now being pushed in parliament, citing the example of longtime Donald Trump ally Nigel Farage calling for parliament to debate imposing stricter limits on abortion last year.
But amid fears the UK could become the new battleground for abortion rights, Ms Creasy issued the rallying cry: “We can and we will win.”
The Walthamstow MP’s intervention came after a screening of Zurawski v Texas – a film about a group of women denied abortions in Texas who band together with a fearless attorney to sue the state government – which was jointly put on by British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) and Amnesty International UK during Trump’s first week in office.
The US president has wasted no time in carrying out his anti-abortion agenda after bragging about “killing” Roe v Wade in his election campaign. He signed a pair of executive orders reviving two anti-abortion policies from his first term – despite his pledges that abortion should be left to the state’s discretion.
Ms Creasy told the crowd in London last Monday: “We should take extreme caution of what is happening in America, in Europe... I know firsthand that the tactics we’ve seen in the US are being used in parliament. Anyone who thinks you’re living safe in a comfortable community where this could never happen needs to wake up.
“What we have seen is the weaponisation of abortion over the past two years – what does that mean? The doubt of women being able to make good choices...
“[Over] the past 10/15 years, anti-abortion[ists] learned from what’s effective in America and brought that here.”
Ms Creasy acknowledged that the abortion debate at a global level is set to “get a lot sharper”, with Trump and Elon Musk dominating the world stage. “There are going to be people thinking women’s bodies are a battleground,” she said.
The MP argued this was evermore reason for those in support of women and pregnant people’s rights to take action and urgently.
“We need to up our game here in the UK if we are to protect the basic human right of universal access to safe and legal abortions,” she said, emphasising: “We don’t have the legal right to have an abortion.”
Abortion should be a healthcare issue, she said – but instead women across the UK continue to face criminal proceedings over terminating their pregnancies, because abortion is still criminalised in this country.
However, campaigners are pushing for that to change this year, with hopes the issue might be addressed in an amendment to a bill tabled in parliament in the upcoming months.
Rachael Clarke, Head of Advocacy at BPAS, told The Independent: “This is the most pro-choice parliament in history. We would expect there’s a good amount of support – not just for decriminalisation [of abortion] but for protecting women’s right to access [it] and also [an acknowledgment] that some bits of the law are out of date... We wouldn’t be trying to open this up and push it if we didn’t think we had the numbers on it.
“You don’t have to agree with what these women have allegedly done to agree that criminalising women for the worse time in their life – that sending them to jail – is not the answer... It takes the bare amount of humanity to say this isn’t the right way to go about this.”
When asked if she is concerned about anti-abortionists similary rallying this year and pushing their agenda from the other side, she said: “Trump has brought an awareness to the fragility of women’s rights, it’s easy to see what opposition looks like now – this is a global organised campaign against women’s rights and no one is beyond the risk of what might happen if they really get their teeth in it.”
Therefore, she expressed cautious hope that the election of leaders like Trump will merely serve to light a fire under the ongoing global fight for abortion – and more broadly women’s – rights.
“I’m never complacent, but I remain hopeful,” she said.
