Reform’s Case for Motherhood

Manna Mostaghim is a PhD Candidate in the Health Policy Department at the LSE. Her PhD thesis is on the provision of publicly subsidised IVF for women with a high BMI in the UK.

The Far Right’s fear of happy, free women who control their reproductive agency

In the far-right imagination, there is a nuclear family that exists behind a white picket fence – where men run decorous fiefdoms of God-fearing justice in suburbs across the world. Women are barefooted and pregnant with inner lives subsumed by growing the many replicas of their patriarch inside them. 

In the current world order, bad women run ascendant within an “unregulated sexual economy”. With Matt Goodwin – British conservative political commentator, failed right-wing political candidate, and former academic – claiming that young women need a “biological reality check” and suggesting that, “people who don’t have children should be taxed extra”.  

But does Reform understand why a pregnant person would want an abortion? Has Reform made motherhood a viable option?          

The case for abortion

The 2023 Abortion statistics for England and Wales demonstrated that economic precarity was the number one reason that people chose to terminate pregnancies. The cost-of-living crisis made having children “irresponsible”.

According to Pregnant than Screwed, with childcare in the UK being the most second expensive in high-income countries, having a child would be “financial suicide”.

Subsequently, Reform does not have an official policy on abortion. But so far, Reform MPs have opposed decriminalising abortion, Farage has called Britain’s 24-week abortion limit “utterly ludicrous“, and prominent figures associated with the party have expressed explicitly anti-abortion views. 

For example, as a previous Abortion Rights blog identified positions from prominent Reform members on abortion include:

• Danny Kruger who has previously argued that women do not have “an absolute right to bodily autonomy”. 
• Maria Caulfield repeatedly voted to restrict abortion access: including opposing buffer zones around clinics, voting against at-home early medical abortion, and describing abortion providers as “unethical, unsafe, and unprofessional”.
• Nadine Dorries has advocated for lowering abortion time limits and to impose new restrictions on access.
• Andrea Jenkyns has a voting record that shows opposition to measures designed to ease access to abortion. She has publicly described herself as personally “pro-life” and has opposed what she calls the “liberalisation” of abortion law.
• Lee Anderson tabled an amendment to scrap “pills by post” early medical abortion access. 

Reform has claimed that it “will form the most pro-family government in British history”. But does it make a compelling case for motherhood? (Beyond: you should do it because God and country demand it). 

The case for Motherhood

First introduced in June 2026, the marquee Reform pro-family policy is the Woman and Motherhood Protection Act. The proposed Act claims to enhance legal protections around maternity and fertility leave, ensure job security, and provide greater flexibility for working mothers and grieving parents. But as Paul Nowak of the Trades Union Congress articulated,

“If Reform was really on the side of women, the party wouldn’t have pledged to rip up the Equality Act, effectively legalising discrimination. They wouldn’t have vowed to repeal new rights being introduced by the Employment Rights Act, like protection from harassment”.

Further, as the apparent party of the “workers”, Reform has “no meaningful commitments to collective bargaining or workplace democracy, calling instead for policies that would benefit the already well-off, such as a major cut in the corporate tax rate…”. 

Nor does it facilitate better conditions for remote work, which has “the potential to reduce labour market inequalities by enabling a wider range of people, for example mothers, to better participate in paid work”. It instead advocates for people to go back into the office.      

Reform also backflipped in March 2026 when they said they would now reimpose the two-child benefit cap. A policy that led to higher rates of unstable employment for working mothers, an increase in child poverty and people choosing not to have further children.

Endorsing further benefit cuts, Reform has recently proposed 50 million dollars of cuts to benefits in the UK, especially targeting disability schemes – as modelled by the Dutch system. However, the Dutch system also demonstrates evidence of costs being transferred to families and a disability system that the Dutch government itself now says needs fundamental repair.

Even more recently, Reform has proposed to prioritise married couples for social housing. Stella Creasy MP pointed out that this was a clear dog whistle to erode women’s agency in leaving partners that are either incompatible or abusive. Reform says it will accommodate women who are survivors of domestic abuse, but it has not specified how it will do so. Women’s Aid states that this policy will, “discourage women in abusive marriages from leaving the perpetrator, worried about keeping a roof over their heads, which could subject them and their children to further abuse and increase the threat to their life”. 

As discussed in a previous Abortion Rights blog: 

According to Refuge, “…40-60 percent of women experiencing domestic abuse had been abused while pregnant…”. People who experience IPV [Intimate partner violence] while pregnant have a greater risk of reproductive health conditions and enduring chronic health conditions. 

IPV can also mean forced pregnancy. As researcher Pam Lowe says, “Policy responses to date have often focused on abortion coercion, but this obscures the evidence that forced pregnancy is more common than forced abortion”. Conversely, people who have abortions are more often subject (or have been subjected to) to IPV.

Meanwhile, at no time has Reform addressed the Birth Trauma crisis in the UK with substantive policy responses. A Birth Trauma crisis which, “an interim report by Baroness Amos, published in February [2026], showed that women, babies and staff are consistently being failed by struggling neonatal and maternity services in the UK. The Ockenden Maternity Review has likewise made clearer the systemic failings apparent in British maternity care. Hundreds of women and babies have died as a result of these failings, which are most often rooted in a shared cause: women’s voices simply not being heard”.

The supposed pro-family party has not endorsed the recommendations of the Birth Trauma Crisis Report, which includes further investment in NHS maternity care services. Rather, they propose to make it more difficult for skilled migrant workers within the NHS to stay in the UK. 

Abortion Rights versus Motherhood, it’s not a competition 

Reform can proclaim that it will form the “most pro-family government in British history”, but motherhood cannot be sustained by slogans about family values and policies that remove women’s rights and make it more difficult to safely have and raise children.

Abortion rights, safe maternity care, employment protections for working families and affordable childcare are not competing political projects. They are different manifestations of the same principle: women should have meaningful control over whether, when and how they become mothers.