Debating abortion law in the United Kingdom last month, members of Parliament were warned that access to abortion was “increasingly under attack.”
Stella Creasy, a Labour MP from London, pleaded with colleagues to “listen to our American counterparts, who bitterly regret not having acted under Biden and Obama to protect abortion access and who now find medics being prosecuted and dragged across state lines.”
Conservatives dismissed her claim. Julia Lopez, an MP representing an outer London suburb, suggested that “the boogeyman of the US right” had made a return to the chamber. “Apparently, unless we agree to these amendments, evangelical religious groups paid for by US cash are going to start rolling back women’s reproductive rights in this country,” she told MPs. “This is utter nonsense.”
The exchange illustrates a sharp divide in how the British interpret the state of abortion access. While pro-life campaigners fear that the country is moving toward an “extreme” position, pro-choice voices see access under threat.
Overturning Roe v. Wade in the US prompted media outlets in the UK to speculate about whether the same could happen in other countries. Dr. Jonathan Lord, a consultant gynecologist for the National Health Service, told The Guardian newspaper earlier this year that “the radical American right wing” had been “empowered” and was attempting to push its “extreme anti-abortion views in the UK and around the world.”
During debate of the UK’s wide-ranging Crime and Policing Bill, MPs rejected Creasy’s proposal to make abortion access a human right in England and Wales but adopted an amendment to decriminalize women who terminate their own pregnancies, regardless of the number of weeks of gestation.
The vote in favor of this change—by a comfortable majority of 379 to 137—was front-page news in the UK, with headlines including “MPs vote to decriminalise abortion at any point up to birth.”
The reality is more nuanced. The 1967 law that legalized abortion in the UK stipulates that abortions will not be criminal offenses provided that they meet certain criteria. Two registered medical practitioners must agree in “good faith” that the woman is not more than 24 weeks pregnant and that there’s a risk to the woman’s physical or mental health, a “substantial risk” that the baby would be “seriously handicapped,” or other limited factors.
The recent amendment does not change this. Anyone other than pregnant women acting outside these conditions—including medical professionals—could still face prosecution. Nevertheless, it aroused strong emotions in Parliament, and Christian groups have voiced their condemnation of the change.
“Dangerous and late-term, self-induced abortion has been legitimised,” wrote Dawn McAvoy, who leads Both Lives UK, an Evangelical Alliance initiative. “Instead of the law protecting both lives in pregnancy, all unborn children have lost legal protections, and women have been abandoned by those tasked and paid to provide care.”
The vote follows a spike in prosecutions of women accused of having illegal abortions since the introduction of “pills by post” during the pandemic. The program, which allows women up to 10 weeks pregnant to receive abortion pills in the mail after a phone consultation, was made permanent in 2022.
Since its introduction, more than 100 women have been criminally investigated, 6 have faced court, and 1 has been sent to prison. During the debate, MPs were told that prior to it, only 3 women had been on trial over the past 160 years.
Among the Christian MPs who spoke during the debate was Rebecca Smith, a Conservative who suggested that a return to face-to-face consultations represented a “better way forward.”
Dr. Caroline Johnson, a Conservative MP who is also a consultant pediatrician, agreed and warned that under pills by post, women accessed abortion pills late in their pregnancies and were left “traumatized.”
Some women have lied to access the pills, while others have been mistaken about the stage of their pregnancies.
Last year, a man was sent to prison for spiking a woman’s drink with abortion pills obtained via the program. The year the program became permanent, a BBC poll of 1,000 women found that 15 percent reported “pressure to terminate a pregnancy when they didn’t want to.”
The Crime and Policing Bill debates renewed conversation about the UK’s abortion laws. Unlike the vast majority of European countries, the UK does not have abortion on request, although many argue that this is what exists in practice.
According to government figures, every year more than 250,000 abortions take place, and one in three women in the UK will have an abortion at some point in their lives.
The country also has some of the most liberal laws in Europe when it comes to late-term abortions. The evangelical Both Lives initiative has highlighted that the vast majority of abortions are carried out for undisclosed mental health reasons.
Against this backdrop, the overwhelming majority of the British public—87 percent—supports access to abortion, though a quarter believe that restrictions should fall earlier than the current 24-week limit.
Although pro-life groups and campaigns exist in the UK, they have nothing like the convening power evident in the United States. Fewer Brits than US citizens identify as Christian, and the constituency most opposed to abortion in the United States—white evangelicals—is a fraction of the size in the UK.
Furthermore, as a report by the think tank Theos observed, the UK lacks “the kind of tight-knit, symbiotic relationship between a right-of-centre political party and a unified Christian constituency” that emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century in the US.
Although some Christian charities are dedicated to campaigning against abortion, they have had to adopt tactics alternative to aligning with a single political party with a set of demands.
James Mildred of the charity CARE (Christian Action Research and Education) has noted that an “absolutist” approach to ending abortion “avoids pragmatism about what is politically possible and therefore gains little support from lawmakers—who are the ones actually able to change the law.”
The Both Lives initiative, first launched by the Evangelical Alliance in Northern Ireland in 2017, now seeks to engender a “new conversation” across the UK around the complexities of abortion.
“For decades British governments have provided—and privileged—one response to a pregnancy crisis: abortion,” said McAvoy. “Despite the language of ‘choice,’ we must ask honestly, ‘Is this system truly pro-choice or simply pro-abortion?’
“Unless we offer meaningful alternatives—real, supported, viable choices—abortion rates will continue to rise. Women who, in other circumstances, might choose to carry, birth, and love their child are being left with no visible path but termination. And disproportionately, it is the most vulnerable—the disadvantaged, the disabled, the unwell—whose lives are being ended.”
In the intermediate term, the initiative aims to see a return to in-person consultations, as MP Johnson had proposed.
Other aims include reducing the time limit “as far as Parliament will accept it,” McAvoy said, and tackling the “disability discrimination” inherent in permitting abortion after 24 weeks in cases of fetal disability.
McAvoy would also like to see the provision of independent counseling for pregnant women to avoid the “conflict of interest” whereby those providing counseling are also those providing abortion.
In common with other pro-life groups, Both Lives is investing in education—marshaling facts and data to better inform the current conversation. CARE has produced material such as “6 things abortion campaigners won’t tell you about decriminalisation.”
Polling is also a popular tactic, testing whether the public’s views on abortion are really that settled. Last month, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children commissioned a poll that found that 67 percent of respondents agreed that “abortion is a matter of life and death, and it is therefore appropriate that the criminal law provides a clear boundary to protect everyone involved.”
The charity has campaigned to end the government’s “two-child benefit cap,” under which only the first two children of a family qualify for some forms of welfare, and it cited evidence that the cap is influencing women’s decisions to have abortions.
In 2022, Christian charities spoke in support of Heidi Crowter, a young women with Down syndrome who unsuccessfully challenged in court the provision of abortion past 24 weeks in the case of babies thought to be disabled.
The Both Lives initiative, with its emphasis on “gracious” and “respectful” conversation, is evidently wary of entering the waters of a culture war. A notable line in the guide states, “We don’t want to see the UK church following a more fundamentalist-partisan-political line when it comes to this issue.”
It’s an approach that mirrors that of other charities. In 2013, the head of CARE, founded in 1983, told Theos:
When CARE started, it would be true to say that CARE staff would, on occasion, march—perhaps with a banner saying “abortion kills” … Very quickly we said we wouldn’t ever do that again because what does that say to the woman who’s standing by the road? … There will be Christians who will say either we’ve gone too soft and lost it … but then we’ll be attacked from the other side who say we’re pro-life and therefore we’re not caring for women.
This is a key challenge that pro-life campaigners must grapple with in the UK. Though they may stress the importance of gracious, respectful debate, in a country with such strong support for abortion, the very act of opposing it is likely to offend.
“We seek to protect life and so have always supported legislative initiatives that seek to lower abortions, whether through changing the legal time limit for abortions or clarifying that sex-selective abortions are illegal under UK law,” said Caroline Ansell, director of advocacy and policy at CARE.
“How we communicate on this issue is of paramount importance,” she said. “Our model is Jesus, who came from the Father, full of truth and grace. We want to hold out a better story on abortion than the one our society tells. That story is based on the amazing truth that a person comes into existence at conception and their life has intrinsic dignity from this point through to its natural end.”
The Both Lives guide warns that the UK church cannot “remain silent and apathetic” on the matter of abortion and cautions that “in the society we live in, the idea of any limit on bodily autonomy will be inherently offensive to many. The church therefore should stand firmly on the truth that all life has inherent dignity and value from the moment of conception.”
In recent years, one tactic adopted by pro-life campaigners has attracted more media attention than any other: prayer outside abortion clinics.
In her book Anti-Abortion Activism in the UK, Pam Lowe, a sociologist, suggests that “anti-abortion activism lacks public support and has largely been unsuccessful since 1967.” She also reports “evidence of increased activism outside abortion clinics, with more faith-based groups beginning to organise ‘vigils’ which seek to deter women from entering.”
In October last year, a new law came into effect prohibiting all protest activity within 150 meters of an abortion clinic. This includes any attempt to “influence” a person’s decision to access the clinic. It’s a rule supported by 77 percent of the public, according to a 2023 poll.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, US vice president JD Vance cited the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a man convicted of breaching a safe access zone after refusing to move on while praying outside a clinic, as evidence of “the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” His intervention was condemned by Creasy in Parliament.
Creasy’s criticism of pro-life campaigning has been challenged by other MPs. The activities she has listed—the March for Life, activities on university campuses, and the lobbying of MPs—are all the rights of citizens in a free country.
Last year, the Northern Irish MP Carla Lockhart, a member of the evangelical Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, accused her of having “demonized” such campaigners, who “value life and who value both lives in every pregnancy.” For its part, the current Labour government has said it is “wholly committed to ensuring access to safe, regulated abortions.”
Creasy is right that American organizations have influence on the landscape in the UK. One example is the Alliance Defending Freedom, a US-based legal organization that provides free representation in cases concerning “religious freedom, free speech, and the sanctity of life.”
Its clients include Smith-Connor and Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the director of the UK March for Life, also arrested and charged after praying outside a clinic.
Meanwhile, the UK affiliate of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR UK) is committed to using the tactics of the founding American organization: graphic images of abortion deployed on the premise that “we will never truly understand the horror of abortion until we see it.”
In 2019, it paid for a billboard campaign in the London area represented by Creasy. The owner of the billboards removed them after Creasy complained she was being harassed. She was pregnant at the time.
The charity’s head of training and development, Aisling Goodison, argues that to end abortion, campaigners must learn the lessons from historical campaigns, including the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in the US—both of which, she argues, deployed graphic images.
While Creasy and others warn of the rise of pro-life activism, the fear among some in this constituency is that the campaign isn’t loud enough.
“Most Christians in the UK today think and behave much like the rest of the world when it comes to abortion,” according to Dave Brennan, the leader of Brephos, CBR UK’s initiative that encourages churches to speak about abortion. “We’ve accepted the rhetoric of choice.”
“Silence has pervaded the church, and we need to find a renewed confidence in the good news of the gospel for both lives in pregnancy,” said McAvoy. “Women facing pregnancy crises and considering abortion, and all those living with post-abortion pain and loss, deserve the hope, help, and healing that we know is found in Jesus.”
Dismissing the “boogeyman of the US right” in the House of Commons last month, Lopez spoke of a “very different and a more balanced national conversation” in the UK.
“It is not extremist to want protections for viable babies, and it is not anti-women to say that coercion or dangerous self-medication should not be outside the reach of the law,” she argued.
The country’s pro-life campaigners agree. But as they seek to turn the tide of public opinion, views within the movement on the right methods remain divided. While some caution against a conversation in the US mold, others see helpful lessons.
