Weekly Spotlight: They Say They Want to Protect Women. We’re Calling BULLSHIT. 

If you were with us in Parliament Square on Saturday, you saw exactly what we are up against.

Every year, anti abortion campaigners tell us their movement is about compassion. They talk about “protecting women”, supporting families and defending life.

But the reality we saw on Saturday looked very different.

Our supporters were shouted at, confronted and subjected to aggressive behaviour simply for standing up for the right to abortion. The hostility was impossible to ignore.

While anti-abortion campaigners were marching through Westminster, another part of the same political project was playing out in Birmingham.

“Protecting women” while taking away their choices

The language of “protecting women” is one of the anti abortion movement’s favourite talking points.

The argument goes that abortion harms women, that women are being failed by reproductive healthcare, and that restricting abortion is somehow an act of protection.

We should be absolutely clear about what this means in practice.

You do not protect women by taking decisions about their pregnancies out of their hands.

You do not protect women by making abortion harder to access.

You do not protect women by criminalising reproductive choices, intimidating people outside clinics or campaigning to roll back rights that generations of women fought to win.

And you certainly do not protect women by deciding that politicians, campaigners or religious organisations know better than women themselves.

The idea that restricting our autonomy is for our own good is not new. It is one of the oldest arguments in the book.

Meanwhile, at Reform UK conference

The timing matters.

As March for Life descended on Westminster on Saturday, Reform UK was holding its national conference at the NEC in Birmingham. The conference ran from 3 to 5 September.

Among the fringe events was Christian Fellowship for Reform, where representatives from three organisations opposed to abortion rights were given a platform.

They included Rupert Evans from Right to Life UK, Simon Calvert from the Christian Institute and Andrea Williams from Christian Concern.

At the event, speakers attacked what they described as “do it yourself abortions” and argued that Reform should reverse the erosion of socially conservative values, including on abortion.

This is exactly why we have been warning against complacency.

Anti abortion politics is not sitting quietly on the fringes. The organisations campaigning against abortion rights are building relationships, finding political platforms and working to move their ideas into the mainstream.

And Reform is increasingly becoming one of the spaces where those ideas are welcomed.

This isn’t happening in isolation

Nigel Farage has already questioned Britain’s 24 week abortion time limit, and his connections to the international anti abortion movement have become increasingly visible.

Last year, his appearance before the US Congress was facilitated by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most powerful Christian conservative legal organisations in the world and a group closely associated with the legal campaign that helped overturn Roe v Wade in the United States.

Now we have anti abortion organisations appearing at Reform’s national conference while the party and figures around it increasingly talk about family, motherhood and women’s rights.

None of these things should be viewed separately.

This is how a culture war is built.

First, abortion is framed as controversial again.

Then existing rights are presented as extreme.

Anti abortion campaigners are invited into political spaces and treated as ordinary policy voices.

Language about “protecting women” provides a softer face for policies that would ultimately give women less control over their own bodies.

And slowly, ideas that once sat well outside mainstream British politics begin to sound more familiar.

We have seen this playbook before.

Saturday showed us why visibility matters

That is why Stand Up for Choice matters.

Standing opposite an anti abortion march is not always comfortable. Saturday reminded us of that.

But silence creates space for the anti abortion movement to claim that it speaks for the public.

It does not.

Britain is overwhelmingly pro choice, but rights are not protected by polling numbers alone. They are protected because people organise, campaign and refuse to allow those rights to be quietly chipped away.

Abortion rights were fought for. They have been defended for decades. And they will continue to be protected by people willing to stand up for them.

Those who want to push us backwards are organised.

We have to be organised too.

Why it matters

When political parties start giving anti abortion organisations space and legitimacy, we should pay attention.

The claim that this is all about “protecting women” cannot go unchallenged. Women do not need protecting from their own choices. They need access to safe healthcare, accurate information, bodily autonomy and the freedom to decide what happens to their own pregnancies.

Saturday showed us the movement trying to take those freedoms backwards.

It also showed something else.

We are here. We are organised. And we are not going anywhere.