Anti-abortion activists gathered outside the UK Houses of Parliament on 27 October to protest 50 years since the passing into law of the UK’s 1967 Abortion Act. Nina Naidu* was working nearby, and went to take a closer look.
Like many women in the UK, she had previous, personal experience with both abortion and virulent anti-choice demonstrators. Earlier this year, the 24-year-old decided to terminate a pregnancy, and was accosted by protestors on the way to her appointment.
At the Westminster demonstration, there were “deeply disturbing” billboards, Naidu told me. “Around 10-foot-tall, reinforced with aluminium scaffolding, they showed blown up images of bleeding foetuses alongside imagery of enslaved black people.”
There were also “Game of Thrones-style CGI pictures of babies being sacrificed in some sort of fantasy orientalised temple,” she said, describing the images on display at the protest, organised by the campaign group Abort67.
The self-styled “genocide prevention” group has used such graphic and emotionally-manipulative pictures since its formation, 11 years ago. Recently, its visibility has increased thanks to growing links with other anti-abortion groups in the UK and abroad.
Abort67 presents its campaigns as connected to the struggles of US civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. It has compared abortion to slavery, the Holocaust, and the hundreds of thousands killed on Burma’s ‘Death Railway.’
This is “the reality of abortion, how bad it looks, how violent it is,” Abort67 campaigner Andy Stephenson told me. “That’s not editorialising on the images, that’s just the images themselves, they really start… and end the debate.”
The group insists its work is emancipatory, saving lives and empowering women. To this Naidu responds: “It’s not a feminist cause, though it tries very hard to position itself in that way.” Rather, she said, Abort67 “de-prioritises women.”
Abort67 was named after the year, 1967, when the UK’s Abortion Act was passed. Introduced as a…