Protesters rally to defend abortion rights
Reform UK’s candidate in the Makerfield by-election claimed women have abortions for “vanity reasons” and so they can “shag who they want”. He says women lie about being raped to justify having abortions.
Self-declared sexist Robert Kenyon posted, “Abortion is the cowardly act of murdering a defenceless baby and not having to face up to it cause a Dr did it. They don’t want babies? Use contreception!” (his typos).
Why are Reform UK obsessed with women’s bodies?
The likes of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage once took an entirely pragmatic approach to abortion rights. Today, they are both deeply hostile to the right to choose.
Farage says it is “utterly ludicrous” to allow abortion up to 24 weeks and the law is “totally out of date”.
Back in 2022, Reform MP Danny Kruger said he disagreed with MPs who “think that women have an absolute right to bodily autonomy in this matter” “Whereas I think in the case of abortion that right is qualified by the fact that another body is involved,” he said.
James Orr, academic and Reform UK’s head of policy, is a fervent opponent of abortion rights in all cases.
He claims, “Britain has one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world, 24 weeks, we’re up there with North Korea, China and, God help us, Canada—this wasn’t extreme enough, that we should be pushing for 37 weeks, 38 weeks”.
Opposition to abortion is not popular. But abortion rights are being fashioned into a unifier and a mobiliser for the global far right.
They share a commitment to the Great Replacement Theory and the misogyny that sees women as incubators unworthy of individual rights and freedoms.
Orr’s views connects him to the most influential evangelicals in Trump’s circle. US vice president JD Vance calls Orr his “English philosopher king”.
Orr joined the Holy Trinity Brompton Church, which is funded by Paul Marshall, the billionaire who owns GBNews, Unherd and the Spectator.
In the 1980s, Holy Trinity Brompton launched the Evangelical Alpha Course which has reached tens of millions worldwide.
Marshall donated £1 million to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a group co-founded by Jordan Peterson in 2023 to promote “Western values” and find alternatives to “woke” ideologies.
Orr was a member of ARC’s advisory board and helped organise ARC’s first London conference in 2023.
Orr was also an advisor to then Conservative MP Danny Kruger. He also made contact with Silicon Valley “broligarch” Peter Thiel, CEO of Palantir Technologies and another hard right evangelical.
Orr hosted Silicon Valley titan Peter Thiel in Cambridge for a series of lectures which he hailed as “the highlight of our academic year”.
Thiel brought the National Conservatism—NatCon—conference to Britain in 2023, with Orr’s help.
Orr joined JD Vance and the Conservative MP and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman at the NatCon conference in Washington DC in 2024.
This far right Christianity interacts with the Great Replacement Theory.
Failed Reform by-election candidate Matt Goodwin called for women and young girls to get a “biological reality” check so Britain could tackle its impending “fertility crisis”.
He also wants people without children to pay higher taxes—just like Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini did.
Journalist Holly Southwick explains how such policies represent “a shift towards using state power to shape women’s personal choices”. “These arguments often appear alongside calls to reduce equality protections and social spending, while offering little in the way of affordable childcare, secure housing, or workplace flexibility,” she says.
“This recasts women’s autonomy as a problem to be corrected, rather than a condition to be supported.”
So the Great Replacement Theory leads to attacks on women’s rights.
Last August, US war secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video in which a far right pastor argued that women should not have the right to vote.
There is a growing movement among US Christian nationalists to repeal the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
This is about more than speeches at conferences—it is fuelling anti-abortion activism.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a US pressure group which helped overturn Roe v Wade and is now focusing on attacking the right to choose in Britain and Europe.
The ADF and its international arm, ADF International, spent a combined $10.9 million on international grants and programmes in the year ending June 2024.
Spending on campaigning in Europe rose by 70 percent. The group’s strategy involves identifying and promoting individual legal cases where Christians allege persecution or censorship for their beliefs.
Both the ADF and JD Vance targeted “safe zones” which protect women from harassment when they access abortion clinics.
What they really want is to turn women into submissive, dependent objects without rights or autonomy.
These bigots have our rights in their sights. We must be ready to defend those rights in the workplaces and in the streets.
Racism first developed as a justification for enslavement
