The anti-abortion movement, which has kept a relatively low profile in the UK in recent years, is gaining strength, Labour MP Stella Creasy told a crowd that had gathered to form a counterprotest to the March for Life in London on Saturday.
In part, Creasy said, this is due to the influence of US campaigners, notorious for their powerful and militant lobbying to reduce access to abortion. But the focal point for her ire was a British Conservative MP.
“There are three words that tell you that this rhetoric, those kinds of campaigns, is coming to our shores: Jacob Rees-Mogg,” Creasy told the crowd.
Rees-Mogg has long been outspoken in his opposition to abortion, and last year he caused uproar when he told ITV that he was “completely opposed” to a pregnancy being terminated, even in cases of rape or incest.
Creasy likened him to US vice president Mike Pence, who imposed some of America's tightest abortion restrictions on the state of Indiana when he was its governor, and recently praised Donald Trump as the “most pro-life president in American history” as he vowed to restrict funding for one of the US's largest abortion providers.
Many of the young people BuzzFeed News spoke to at the annual anti-abortion march spoke of the importance of free speech when it came to expressing opposition to abortion – and held up Rees-Mogg as a vocal leader of the movement.
He was not at the march, but his presence was felt. Among people wearing anti-abortion slogan T-shirts and clerical dress, several men wore bowler hats with Rees-Mogg’s signature style of old-fashioned suit, despite the scorching sunshine.
Creasy is not alone in her concern that Rees-Mogg is becoming a figurehead. Her comments were echoed by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), one of the UK's largest abortion providers: “Jacob Rees-Mogg is an extremist on abortion who appeals to extremists on abortion,” Clare Murphy, BPAS's director of communications, said.
“Rees-Mogg has an absolute right to express his views on abortion – we should make sure he motivates us all to stand up and campaign for the legal framework women in the 21st century need and deserve,” she continued.
There are rather a lot more men (including mini Rees-Moggs) on the anti-choice side than among the pro-choice.
Seventeen-year-old Matthew, who was at the march with a group of male friends aged between 16 and 20, told us he wished there were more MPs like Rees-Mogg who were “actually going to stand up for” restricting abortion rights – something he hoped would return to the parliamentary agenda soon.
“I respect him a lot,” Matthew, one of around 1,500 marchers, said. He found it “refreshing” that Rees-Mogg was so vocal about being against abortion, specifically praising his comments about opposing abortion even in the case of rape.
“It is impressive that he does that, and I think we need more people like that,” Matthew continued.
“The Tories are a lot more liberal than they used to be. Most politicians are probably going to go with the flow.
“Theresa May is never going to go out and say she’s pro-life, especially in the situation she’s in.” May has said that it is her “personal view” that the abortion time limit should be lowered from 24 weeks to 20, and has voted in favour of making gender-selective abortion illegal and requiring the prospects for life of a disabled child to be considered before a termination is granted, but has otherwise not been especially outspoken on the issue.
Matthew added that Rees-Mogg being so openly anti-abortion gave him “more confidence” to express his own anti-abortion views.
“Society is pulling people away from those sort of views, saying you’re so stupid for being pro-life, but I think it’s really refreshing for him to come out and say things like that,” Matthew continued.
“There’s someone out there speaking for you.”
Last month, when Ealing council in London introduced a public spaces protection order (PSPO) that prevented demonstrations outside a local abortion clinic following allegations that anti-abortion groups were harassing women who were accessing the procedure, many of those who had been moved on claimed they were being silenced. This year the March for Life relocated to London from Birmingham after Birmingham city council denied protesters permission to hold the event.
It all adds to the feeling among anti-abortion protesters that free speech is being eroded. James, 20, was also among those at Saturday's rally who believed that young people with anti-abortion views were being silenced by an abortion-rights status quo.
“If you see a university, there’s lots of so-called safe spaces where people can’t express their views completely,” he said.
He was especially disgruntled that former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, who has openly expressed his opposition to abortion and homosexuality on account of his Christian faith, said that being unable to reconcile his religious views on such matters with those of wider society was at the heart of his decision to resign.
“I’m not positioned [with him] ideologically, but he had to stand down because of his religious views on a really specific thing,” James said. “We’re talking about freedom here, freedom of speech, freedom of expression – that’s not happening in today’s society, I think.”
The UK is overwhelmingly in favour of abortion rights: 93% of people polled in the most recent British Social Attitudes survey supported abortion in at least some circumstances, including 70% who believed a woman should be able to have an abortion if she does not want a child. This percentage was even greater among young people.
“Our figures suggest that the majority of young people in Britain believe that abortion should be a choice,” Eleanor Attar Taylor, senior researcher at the National Centre for Social Research, which conducts the survey annually, told BuzzFeed News.
Among 18-to-26-year-olds polled in 2016, 76% believed a woman should be able to have an abortion if she does not want a child, an increase of 24% since 1983.
When the Ealing PSPO was passed in April, Alithea Williams from the anti-abortion group Society for the Protection of Unborn Children called it a “bad day for democracy in the UK”.
“For the first time, a council has banned peaceful public acts of witness and freedom of expression,” she added.
Anna Veglio-White, founder of Sister Supporter, the abortion rights group that campaigned for the introduction of a PSPO in Ealing, dismissed the idea that the abortion rights movement was somehow in opposition to a person's right to express an alternate view.
“If you don’t agree with abortion, don’t have one, but freedom of speech does not equate to the right to take that choice away from someone,” she told us.
Veglio-White worried that the anti-abortion movement adopting this argument distracted from the impact that unwanted pregnancies could have on women.
“It is clear that freedom of speech is used by the anti-abortion lobby as a sword not a shield,” she continued.
“They are free to express those views in appropriate places such as parliament, as they did this weekend.
“There will always be those who disagree with abortion, nobody is trying to silence them, but freedom of expression has never, and should never, override another human's right to bodily autonomy.”
Speakers at Saturday’s anti-abortion rally read from the Bible, and some of the crowd could be seen silently praying on College Green, but younger protesters BuzzFeed News spoke to said religion was not part of the reason they were there.
“It’s about saving lives,” Bernard, 18, said.
“On logical principals [abortion] is totally immoral anyway,” Kenneth Morris, who wore a bowler hat and waved a St George’s flag during the rally, told us. “You wouldn’t require religion to take the view we take.”
Lucy and Stella, two girls in their late teens who BuzzFeed News met at Saturday's march, were keen to speak out against the expectation that young women automatically support abortion rights.
“It’s important to show that we’re different,” Lucy said.
“We’re just hoping that people will open their eyes to [the anti-abortion movement] if we express our views,” Stella added.
But despite the huge turnout on the anti-abortion march, Kerry Abel, the chair of the Abortion Rights campaign, who organised Saturday’s counterprotest, told us she thought it likely represented the UK's entire anti-abortion community and did not worry that they were gaining strength.
She described the march as “a fringe set of Christians who don’t represent even the Christian community”.
Abel was confident that the public and parliament were on the side of abortion rights. “I haven’t felt more positive about the pro-choice moving forward in 10 years,” she said.
“The silent majority is definitively pro-choice. We are a pro-choice country.”
While abortion remains illegal in almost all circumstances in Northern Ireland, government funding was recently secured by Creasy to allow women from there to travel to England to legally terminate a pregnancy, and at Saturday’s counterprotest, she said that she is continuing to work to ensure those women can access the procedure at home.
Last year Labour MP Diana Johnson won cross-party support for her 10-minute rule bill on the decriminalisation of abortion in the UK, and she too continues to work on finding ways to move a full bill through parliament.
But despite overall support for abortion rights, Abel emphasised the importance of Saturday’s counterprotest.
She added: “We all need reminding every now and then that it’s fundamental that we have control over our bodies in order to go to work every day, in order to choose how to live our lives.”
CORRECTION
Anna Veglio-White founded Sister Supporter. A previous version of this post misstated her name.