The St George Cross over your womb: pro-natalism as the breeding ground for the erosion of your reproductive rights

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 fervour of the Unite the Kingdom rallies has seen a group of people indulge in arts and crafts across the United Kingdom. In a fun display of patriotism, people have been drawing red crosses on roundabouts and pedestrian crosses to evoke a return to British values.

British values that are upheld by (literally) crumbling institutions that are hostage to successive austerity measures that are killing people. British values that are being actively shaped by foreign funding to undermine the rights of voters and access to abortion. British values like waiting i.e. languishing in A&E waiting rooms and waiting lists to access NHS services.

Keep Calm as you lose access to your services and Carry On as we silence your concerns.    

It feels easy to mock those who turn up to Unite the Kingdom rallies, broadcasting the views of people from the crowd who make senseless gaffes. Uneducated, uninformed, unemployed. But the main perpetrators of the far-right agenda are not the crowd but the well organised and well funded likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who self identifies as Tommy Robinson) who exploits austerity conditions for his far-right political agenda. 

Meanwhile the far-right is courting voters with a regressive agenda – that includes an erosion of abortion rights – and the crowds for the Unite the Kingdom rallies attest to the public’s seduction. So what is the cost of sneering smugness? We identify the wrong villains, and we lose our rights, claiming to be smarter than them.   

We may not agree with their culprit (immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees) but we can agree that civic infrastructure and public services need to be strengthened. Ergo, to protect reproductive rights, we need stronger systems and institutions for everyone. But we also need to identify the tune of the dog whistles the British public are learning to hum and counter it with fact based responses.  

Pro-Natalist Politics and Nationalism

High income countries across the world are anxious about falling birth rates, fears of demographic decline, or perceived threats to cultural or national identity. Subsequent policies, and discourse, echo broader anxieties about borders, belonging, and a preservation of “Britishness”. Pro-natalist policies respond by making giving birth to children a patriotic duty. Reproductive autonomy, especially abortions, transform into a selfish act that sacrifices national survival.  

The subsequent ascendancy of far-right views in mainstream discourse have consistently been married to the derogation of abortion rights. The United States, Poland, Italy and Hungary have all borne witness to abortion rights becoming more precarious with a strengthened mandate from right-wing, populist leaders.

UK Politicians across the spectrum have also urged Britons to have more children (Labour, Conservatives, Reform). As the current leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, has stated, the UK needed to answer the question of how we “make sure we can deal with [an] ageing society, people not having enough children”..it was not the right option to rely on immigration which is “making things worse; it is making us all poorer”.

However, as Sochas and Chanfreau have identified, fewer and fewer people are having children in the UK because of economic precarity due to austerity. While the annual abortion statistics for England and Wales identify that individuals in the most economically precarious populations tend to have abortion at higher rates. Abortions are therefore not the selfish choices of un-patriotic people abandoning their national duty, they are the result of their nation and civic infrastructure abandoning them.

Pro-natalist policies are merely a convenient cover to demand reproductive production for national stability. While politicians, and commentators, disregard the basis for why people may have an abortion.  

The ascendancy of the far right in mainstream discourse

The Unite the Kingdom rallies cited the protection of women and girls as a fundamental pillar of their agenda and mandate. The ruthless exploitation of instances of sexual violence by asylum seekers, and Asian grooming gangs, was repeatedly cited. Although the patriarchy is colour blind, the far right continues to conveniently frame foreigners as the almost exclusive threat to women.      

But the supplemental truth is that data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales indicates that 83% of convicted sexual offenders of child sexual abuse are White British (a higher proportion than their representation in the general population, which stands at 75%). Nor was there any mention at the Unite the Kingdom rally of the racially aggravated rape of a Sikh women in the Midlands, this week, who was told during the attack, “”You don’t belong in this country, get out.” Nor was there any reference to the fact that 2 out of 5 of the people arrested in last year’s riots against asylum seeker hotels had previously been convicted for domestic abuse. Nor was there any mention of the culture of “violent misogyny” in the British Armed Forces. Nor was there any mention of the sexual violence perpetuated by British Armed forces, globally. Nor was there any mention of the incidences of sexual violence perpetuated by aid workers from high income countries against local populations. Etc, etc, etc.      

But far-right populists still frame their politics as the essential fortress for women’s protection; and when policies are made in moments of crisis or fear, abortion rights are more likely to be curtailed. As the far-right protest movements become more visible, more tolerated, more influential, it can shift what legislators think is acceptable. It gives authority to those seeking to roll back abortion access, tighten restrictions and to stigmatise care.

Abortion Rights believes that everyone who wants an abortion, should have one. There is no such thing as a good or bad abortion. There are just abortions. But the ascendancy of far-right discourse makes abortion also a fertile ground for nationalist and far-right politics to speculate on women’s purity, tradition, morality. Tropes that are often mobilised to degrade or subordinate women’s autonomy and erode their right to abortion.

Intersectionality and reproductive rights

The pro-natalism of nationalist movements often warn of the threat of the white replacement theory; as they evoke the fourteen words. As far-right French politician Éric Zemmour told protesters, at the Unite the Kingdom rally this last weekend, they were subject to “the great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture”, adding that “you and we are being colonised by our former colonies”.

While the Fourteen Words create a clear ethos of a future racialised reproductive agenda for the far right movement. Coined by white supremacist David Eden Lane, the Fourteen Word commands so-called patriots with the words, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children…” An ethos wherein which racial hierarchies are reinforced to support white supremacy via sexual and reproductive health policies. 

The Fourteen Word ethos creates a clear distinction of the desirable births versus undesirable births across so called ‘White Countries’; and makes pro-natalist policies a matter of national security. Abortion as a tool of reproductive autonomy could be subject to an advocacy to be undermined in service to the Fourteen Words. So far, white nationalist sentiments remain on the fringes of the anti-abortion movement in the UK – but the increasing acceptance of far-right rhetoric foreshadows a dark future for abortion rights and future discourse.   

When we care about abortion rights, bodily autonomy, health, dignity – we need to understand that those rights do not exist in a vacuum. They are embedded in power structures of race, nationality, gender, class.

Although the recent decriminalisation of abortion was welcomed by many across the abortion rights space, critiques were levelled against it for its myopia. Abortion decriminalisation with a Crime and Policing Bill that expanded police powers to surveil political dissidence and further criminalises asylum seekers is inextricably linked to legitimising the policy agenda of far-right populists.     

And in times of political upheaval, we must insist on seeing those connections, because only by connecting them can we defend more than just a legal status; we defend the possibility that every person can live in a society where their body, their health, their choices are respected.

What we can do:

• Monitor laws and local policy changes, especially those that seem tangential (e.g. laws about speech, “morality”, “protecting women”) they often lay groundwork to restrict abortion or sexual health services.
• Defend safe spaces like clinics, counselling, community-based support especially for those who are most marginalized.
• Elevate voices and stories of intersectionality migrant women, racialised communities, working-class people – whose experiences of reproductive health are often ignored in broader debates.
• Build solidarity alliances: between reproductive justice advocates, anti-racism activists, migrant rights groups. Oppression doesn’t come in neat silos.