Anti-abortion charity Life is preparing to launch a major campaign targeting people searching online for keywords related to abortion – meaning that someone who’s pregnant and using a search engine to search for information about her choices might be faced with anti-abortion rhetoric instead of factual and unbiased advice.
This news should concern anyone who supports access to safe, legal abortion as, underneath a superficial layer of pro-woman rhetoric, Life’s views on abortion and sex and relationships education (SRE) do not reflect women’s rights to make safe choices.
Life claims that abortion is “intensely sad” and something that “no woman ever wants” without providing any evidence to back up these sweeping statements. In fact, research has found that 95% of women don’t regret their abortions, and there are probably as many mixes of emotions after having an abortion as there are people who’ve had the procedure, as the #ShoutYourAbortion campaign highlights.
The claim about abortion not being something that women want is undermined by the fact that, even in countries where abortion is illegal, women go to great lengths to access terminations. Mara Clarke, CEO of the Abortion Support Network, has spoken of women who contact her charity, which provides funds to women from Ireland and Northern Ireland forced to travel to England and pay privately for abortions, after attempts to self-abort have failed; she’s heard from women who have drunk bleach, or who have asked their partners to punch them in the stomach to try to induce a miscarriage.
As well as providing pregnancy counselling, which Life claims is “non-directive”, and housing for young mothers, Life works in schools giving talks to pupils; in 2013-14 it claimed to have reached more than 27,000 students in schools and colleges across the UK. In 2011, it was appointed to the government’s (now defunct) sexual health forum, following which many documents – such as this one on the supposed medical consequences of abortion – were scrubbed from its website. Two reports by Brook’s project Education for Choice raised serious concerns about the quality of both the counselling and the education sessions provided by Life. They found that leaflets from Life that had been given to schools included the following, fact-free statements:
• “There is a clear link between abortion and breast cancer as well as between abortion and infertility.”
• “The condom does not give much protection against any of them [STIs] even Aids [sic]. Instead, by encouraging sexual activity, it may be making matters worse.”
• “Abortion is the panic reaction. It is violent and negative. Many would say it’s really an uncaring, unloving way of trying to solve someone else’s problem.”
Leaflets still on Life’s website, meanwhile, offer a snapshot of the type of education those 27,000 pupils will be getting, with marriage described as providing “a more secure basis for child-rearing and relationship stability than other forms of relationship”, a statement of its opposition to abortion “in all cases”, and one linking abortion to mental health issues.
Mystery shoppers for the report into crisis pregnancy centres found that the counselling given by Life was not exactly “non-directive”, with Life’s Oxford care centre claiming “strong evidence” of a link between abortion and breast cancer, while a Life centre in Reading claimed that 25% of women who have had abortions “need quite long-term counselling after it”.
Life likes to distance itself from other anti-abortion groups, claiming: “We do not do vigils or protests outside clinics, we do not obstruct women and we don’t tell them what to do.” It’s hard to take that last claim seriously, given the wealth of evidence that Life directly influences women through provision of misleading information and emotional manipulation. What’s really worrying is that when most young people report that the SRE they receive is not good enough, Life’s move to targeted advertising may mean young people don’t have the tools they need to evaluate materials from Life and from other anti-choice groups and to make their own decisions.
UK anti-abortion organisations have taken an increasing number of cues from US anti-choice campaigners: recent years have seen the spread of twice-yearly clinic vigils to the UK, while many abortion clinics have near-permanent protests outside them, causing great distress to clients and staff. Though the move to targeted ads isn’t necessarily new, the potential for ads to be targeted to very narrow demographics – such as the group of people sitting in the waiting room of an abortion clinic – is causing concern among abortion providers in the US. And given that where the US anti-abortion movement leads, UK anti-choicers tend to follow, perhaps the day when organisations such as British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) and Marie Stopes have to warn clients to use ad-blockers is not as far off as we might like.
To be clear, anti-abortion groups are entitled to their views, and have a right to try to convince others of them too; but this should not rely on the use of misinformation and it should take place in public, not in a counsellor’s room.
