David Paternotte

EPF Director Neil Datta on the growing power of anti-gender movements, their increasing professionalisation and the role of religion

May 26, 2026
IPS Journal

You describe today’s anti-gender movement as ‘the next wave’. What is meant by this?

By ‘the next wave’, I mean that in terms of the anti-gender movement – the movement against sexual and reproductive rights, sexual minorities, gender and children – we’re dealing with a fundamentally different movement than what we had become accustomed to. We used to think of it as religious social conservatism, mainly about accommodating certain social values. But what we are dealing with now is a highly organised, strategic political movement with clear ambitions to gain access to power and reshape society.

That is what we need to understand about this ‘next wave’. It is no longer the past anti-abortion activism. It is a political project that is pushing societies towards de-democratisation.

Continued: https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/these-are-no-longer-amateurs-with-billboards-9063/

As some European countries rolled out ‘telemed’ abortion, others shut down access completely.

by Sarah Hurtes and Daniel Boffey
Wed 21 Apr 2021

Kay, 34, realised her period was late a month into Britain’s lockdown. The coronavirus death count was spiralling across the country. Covid-19 was putting the NHS under unprecedented strain and Boris Johnson had given the British people what he described as “a very simple instruction” in an address to the nation from Downing Street: “You must stay at home.”

A worrying, unsettling time, and Kay, a mother of a six-year-old girl, needed to get hold of a pregnancy test kit. She went online and, two days later, took delivery of the test, learning of a positive result via two pink lines. It was the news she had dreaded.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/21/pills-in-the-post-how-covid-reopened-the-abortion-wars

Global – ‘These are no longer amateurs with billboards’

UK – Pills in the post: how Covid reopened the abortion wars