USA – Inside the legal fight over the telehealth clinics that help women defy abortion bans

Every month, thousands of women evade abortion bans in their home states by turning to telehealth clinics willing to send them pregnancy-ending drugs through the mail

By MICHAEL HILL and SUSAN HAIGH, Associated Press
June 12, 2025

Every month, thousands of women thwart abortion bans in their home states by turning to telehealth clinics willing to prescribe pregnancy-ending drugs online and ship them anywhere in the country.

Whether this is legal, though, is a matter of debate. Two legal cases involving a New York doctor could wind up testing the shield laws some states have passed to protect telehealth providers who ship abortion pills nationwide.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/inside-legal-fight-telehealth-clinics-women-defy-abortion-122763768


The International Movement Behind Anti-Abortion Activism

It’s fueled by racism, says Professor Carol Mason in her new book.

Eleanor J. Bader
Jun 12, 2025

In From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, Carol Mason, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky, draws a through line that connects both domestic and international anti-abortion activism to an ascendant network of white supremacist, Christian nationalist and authoritarian movements.

It’s a scary read, grounded in Mason’s three decades of attendance at rightwing events and perusal of scores of books, articles and pamphlets penned by anti-abortion conservatives. Her goal? To understand the ideology and motivating factors that have propelled the movement for the past half century.

Continued: https://indypendent.org/2025/06/the-international-movement-behind-anti-abortion-activism/


US anti‑abortion cash floods UK free speech frontlines

Democracy for Sale investigation finds US anti‑abortion lawyer funding Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, while Alliance Defending Freedom’s UK spending soars.

May 31, 2025
By Peter Geoghegan and Max Colbert

Nigel Farage has often described himself as ‘pro-choice’ - but this week the Reform leader declared that plans to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks are “utterly ludicrous”.

Farage’s comments were striking. Not least as the abortion proposals have been backed by a cross-party group of MPs. But the Reform leader is not the only figure on the political right who seems to have a growing interest in Britain’s abortion laws.

Continued: https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/us-antiabortion-cash-floods-uk-free-speech-union-adf


‘We’re ready to fight’: activists brace as US anti-rights figures descend on Africa

Ultra-conservative campaigners fly in for ‘family values’ conferences to share tactics with African allies who oppose abortion and LGBTQ+ rights

Jessie Williams
Fri 9 May 2025

Advocates for sexual, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights in Africa are bracing themselves for an influx of some of the most powerful, ultra-conservative campaigners from the US, Poland, Switzerland and the Netherlands over the coming months.

The prominent campaigners, who all oppose abortion, transgender and LGBTQ+ rights, and are against sexuality education, are due to speak at a series of conferences focused on African “family values” and “national sovereignty”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/may/09/africa-family-values-anti-rights-conferences-conservative-christian-abortion-lgbtq-gender-uganda-kenya-rwanda


UK – JD Vance may disagree, but this anti-abortion activist isn’t a brutally censored dissident

The US vice-president’s avid concern for Livia Tossici-Bolt’s conviction is plain sinister
Catherine Bennett
Sun 6 Apr 2025

You know the feeling: you’re feeling sociable, why wouldn’t you make a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want to”, and head for a spot outside the nearest abortion clinic? And why wouldn’t some of its arriving patients want to pause before their appointments and satisfy your entirely innocent interest in their reproductive intentions?

This, give or take, amounted to the case by the prominent anti-abortion campaigner, Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was on Friday found guilty of twice breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). Her sign-holding outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic was, she had argued, not covered by a council-imposed safe zone, being “a mere invitation to speak”. And thus an invitation she could have happily extended to strangers just a little further from the clinic. But that did not suit Tossici-Bolt’s purpose. Nor does anything prevent her from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere except right in abortion patients’ faces outside clinics. These details, although similar regulations exist in parts of the US, routinely fail to surface in accounts by her prominent US supporters, with whose help Tossici-Bolt has been misrepresenting the illegal undermining of UK women’s reproductive rights as a noble quest for free speech.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/jd-vance-may-disagree-but-this-anti-abortion-activist-isnt-a-brutally-censored-dissident-livia-tossici-bolt


The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without a fight, other nations may follow

Organisations that pumped money into overturning Roe v Wade are making inroads in Europe. Women’s rights are truly at risk

Deborah Frances-White
Sat 5 Apr 2025

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda. From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights. But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here. This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right. She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/christian-right-us-gilead-roe-v-wade-europe-women-rights-abortion


UK – Campaigner defiant over abortion clinic breach

Apr 5, 2025
BBC

A woman convicted of breaching an abortion clinic protection zone has said she will continue her "fight for free speech".

Livia Tossici-Bolt, 64, was given a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of £20,000 for two charges of breaking a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). The anti-abortion campaigner held a sign reading "Here to talk, if you want" outside a clinic in Bournemouth on two days in March 2023.

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxnz7171yno


Prayer and prosecutions: the US ‘hate group’ waging war over Britain’s abortion clinic buffer zones

Anti-abortion campaigners cheer as JD Vance brands safe zones an attack on ‘liberties of religious Britons’

Shanti Das
Sun 16 Feb 2025

Rachael Clarke remembers life before buffer zones. Almost every day, the head of staff at the UK’s biggest abortion provider would get emails from staff worried about protesters outside clinics – and women crying in the waiting room.

Some of the protesters had huge placards with graphic images of foetuses. Others held candlelit vigils and said prayers. One scattered baby clothes in the bushes. “We had every­thing from people telling women that having an abortion was putting their baby in a meat grinder to people following nurses down the road in the dark telling them they were killing babies,” says Clarke.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/16/prayer-and-prosecutions-the-us-hate-group-waging-war-over-britains-abortion-clinic-buffer-zones


The GOP Plot to Bankrupt Planned Parenthood

By Susan Rinkunas
Jan 15, 2025

Despite the crucial fact that federal money cannot be used for abortions, Republicans have been trying to cut off all sources of federal funding to Planned Parenthood since 2007. The money the health care organization receives through various government programs covers birth control, sexually transmitted infection testing, and cancer screenings, but archconservatives want to shut down the country’s largest abortion provider by excluding it from these programs. Donald Trump pledged to anti-abortion groups during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns that he would “defund” the organization. It’s possible that Republicans for the first time in years have a plausible path to this longtime goal and Trump might not even need to act.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/gop-plot-bankrupt-planned-parenthood-abortion-trump.html


Abortion provider accuses Nigel Farage of pushing anti-abortion agenda to ‘ingratiate’ himself with Trump

Reform UK leader accused of ‘using women’s bodies and lives to score cheap political points’

Maya Oppenheim, Women’s Correspondent
Tuesday 10 December 2024

Farage has been accused of pushing an anti-abortion agenda to “score cheap political points” and “ingratiate” himself with soon-to-be US president Donald Trump.

The Reform UK leader recently said parliament should debate rolling out stricter limits on abortion for women - suggesting the current time limit may need to be made shorter.

Continued: https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-abortion-debate-trump-b2661900.html