How America’s Abortion Wars Are Creeping Into British Women’s Healthcare

Every day in England and Wales, around 760 people will have an abortion. For most, it’s a private decision. Increasingly, though, the path to care is crowded, not just with protestors, but with an American-style culture war quietly staking a claim in British politics.

For women seeking abortion services across the UK, the final stretch of their journey to a clinic can be fraught in ways they hadn’t anticipated: crossing a pavement where strangers stand in silence, perhaps praying, offering leaflets or attempting to strike up conversation. There may be no shouting, placards, pushing or shoving, but these encounters can still feel intrusive and unsettling at one of the most vulnerable moments of a person’s life.

“Getting to the clinic felt like the longest part of my journey,” remembers *Georgie, 29, who had a medical abortion at 11 weeks. “They just stood there,” she says, referring to the silent protestors outside the clinic who made her feel “watched” and “judged.”

Abortion clinic safe zones were introduced to protect people like Georgie, but those protections are now being challenged, not only by British campaigners, but by a powerful American legal organisation whose work helped overturn Roe v. Wade in the US. That same organisation is now attempting to reframe British restrictions on clinic protests as threats to free speech and religious liberty.

Polling suggests the wider picture is shifting, too. New research from Plan International UK, based on a survey of over 2,000 adults, reveals a growing sense of backsliding on gender equality. Nearly a quarter (24%) believe progress on women’s and girls’ rights globally is weak and could be lost.

“Despite some progress, the fight for gender equality is far from over,” says Amelia Whitworth, Head of Policy, Campaigns & Youth at Plan International UK. “Attempts to roll back reproductive rights are not isolated — they are part of a wider attack on women and girls’ rights, gaining ground here in the UK and across the world. Hard-won freedoms are being challenged, and organised efforts are gathering pace that seek to reverse decades of progress.”

Nelly London, an activist and body positivity content creator, sees those pressures playing out online and IRL. “People definitely assume that abortion care is safe in the UK and that it will always be there for them,” she says. “But sadly, the influence coming in from the far right in America is really real, and I see it more and more every day.”

“Our rights to abortion care in the UK are — I don’t want to say under attack — but they’re definitely being looked at. So we do have to continue to defend them and continue to fight for them,” she adds.

At the centre of this shift is the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a US-based anti-abortion legal organisation that has been scaling up its UK presence. Journalist Peter Geoghegan, author of the Substack Democracy for Sale, reports that ADF now “regularly represents buffer-zone protesters, lobbies Westminster, attends the all-party parliamentary group on Freedom of Religion or Belief, briefs MPs and officials — and quotes Nigel Farage approvingly in its press releases.”

Jane Bradley, the New York Times investigative reporter who has examined ADF’s international strategy, describes its approach as a Trojan horse. “They market their work as free speech cases,” she explains, “rather than abortion cases.” Legal challenges defending people who silently pray outside abortion clinics — spaces designed to protect patients — are presented as battles for religious liberty, masking what critics argue is the real aim: restricting women’s bodily autonomy.

Bradley says the UK is seen as a strategic bridge to Europe, a place where legal precedents and cultural shifts can ripple across the continent. Through litigation and public campaigns, ADF is backing challenges to abortion clinic buffer zones, reframing healthcare access as an ideological battleground and reopening a debate many believed had long been settled.

The consequences are already visible. Even where abortion is legal, access in the UK is far from equal. Rural areas, low-income communities and younger people face the greatest barriers — a situation worsened, campaigners say, by the rise of unregulated “crisis pregnancy centres.”

Ophelia Chidgey, PhD, co-chair of Amnesty Feminists, warns that these centres are deliberately misleading. “They position themselves as pregnancy support services,” she explains. “They use names that sound medical. They advertise ‘free pregnancy tests’ and ‘counselling.’ But they’re run by non-medical staff with explicit anti-abortion agendas.”

“They spread medically false information, telling people abortion causes breast cancer, infertility and mental illness,” Chidgey says. “None of that is true. They pressure vulnerable people. They delay access until it’s too late. They’re not healthcare providers — they’re political operations funded to stop abortion.”

Chidgey points to the scale of the funding behind this movement. “Alliance Defending Freedom isn’t just operating in the UK — they’re scaling up at breathtaking speed. Since 2019, anti-rights groups have spent £106 million in the UK,” she says. “This is the organisation that joined forces with conservative politicians and weaponised the US courts to systematically dismantle Roe v. Wade. Now they’re importing that exact playbook to the UK, and with serious money behind them.”

For those watching from the US, the warning signs are familiar. Becca Rea-Tucker, a reproductive justice advocate in Texas and author of The Abortion Companion, has seen the consequences unfold in real time. “Abortion bans destroy families,” she says. “People are dying after being denied care. These deaths were preventable.” Her message to the UK is stark: legal protections mean little if they can be hollowed out through culture, courts and stigma.

American abortion rights activist Amelia Bonow, co-creator of the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign, agrees. “Abortion bans don’t eliminate abortion,” she says, pointing to new data that shows that the abortion rate in the US has actually increased in the years since the Dobbs decision. “But these restrictions do create a minefield of struggle that will be most difficult and dehumanising for marginalised people to navigate safely.”

“What’s often missing from mainstream debate,” Bonow adds, “is that abortion restrictions are not abstract moral questions. They are policy choices that distribute harm in ways designed to compound existing economic and racial inequalities.”

Politically, the pressure is mounting. Louise McCudden, UK Head of External Affairs at MSI Reproductive Choices, notes that while public and parliamentary support for abortion remains strong, it is not immune to erosion. “Most people in the UK are pro-choice and so are most MPs,” she says. “However, with the US-led anti-abortion movement funnelling over a million pounds a year into the UK, and with Reform leader Nigel Farage making comments that threaten the consensus on abortion access, it’s no time to be complacent.”

“In recent years,” McCudden adds, “MPs across all major parties have voted to stop prosecuting people for ending their own pregnancies, to ban harassment outside abortion clinics and to make at-home abortion care legal. The anti-abortion movement threw everything it had at opposing these popular reforms, but MPs rightly listened to women instead.”

Still, gaps remain. Abortion is one of the few medical procedures in Britain that requires sign-off from two doctors. Access varies widely by postcode. Wales and Northern Ireland continue to experience inconsistent provision. “Your geography determines your rights,” Chidgey says. “People in rural areas, those on low incomes, and those experiencing domestic violence face the biggest barriers.”

“Legal abortion means nothing when access is designed as a battlefield,” she adds. “And anti-rights groups are systematically funding organisations to block the door.”

The cultural strategy extends well beyond abortion. Bradley notes that ADF is investing heavily in campus organising and professional networks. “There’s a big focus on university campuses,” she says — building a pipeline of future doctors, lawyers and policymakers “who can then carry the torch.”

Deborah Frances-White, AKA The Guilty Feminist, is blunt about the risk. “Never doubt that allowing a radical right-wing populist party with links to MAGA endangers our bodily autonomy,” she says. “Look at how quickly rights were stripped away in the US.”

“They’re incredibly effective at changing the public mood”, Bradley adds. Her reporting shows ADF pursuing a long-term agenda: reframing anti-choice positions as religious protection, steadily reshaping public discourse, and influencing UK policy from behind the scenes. What makes the Alliance Defending Freedom so effective, she says, is not speed but patience. In the UK, where abortion still enjoys broad public and political support, the organisation has learned not to fight on abortion openly. Instead, it packages cases around buffer zones as battles over free speech and religious liberty — softening public opinion, building legal precedent, and laying the groundwork for long-term cultural change.

Abortion care is healthcare. Yet as American money, messaging, and legal tactics seep into British life, women are once again being asked to justify control over their own bodies. The lesson from the US is clear: rights assumed to be settled can still be lost.

The question now is whether the UK recognises the warning signs, or only understands them when it’s too late.