From editorial director of news Kate Shellnutt: When I asked our freelancer in London, Madeleine Davies, to write about Parliament’s vote in June decriminalizing abortion for women, I didn’t expect the story to involve the US decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
 
In the immediate aftermath of the landmark 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we’d wondered about whether the pro-life move from the US would slow the adoption of more liberal abortion laws abroad. “It will also make it much harder to argue at the UN that abortion is an international human right when half the US believes, and will now enforce, the exact opposite,” a Christian doctor in Britain had suggested at the time.  
 
Years later, we’re seeing a different trajectory in the UK. Just as the US has seen some states banning the procedure and others enshrining expanded protections for abortion, the backlash to Roe’s reversal has reverberated across the pond, with politicians using “threat of the US right” to urge the adoption of more extreme abortion-rights laws.