Good article in the Guardian about US Gilead and it's effect on the UK

[mdbl]

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

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.

During the debate, Hawley argued that Roe was a “usurpation of democratic process” made by an all-male supreme court. She mentioned the constitution a lot but, curiously, I didn’t hear her mention God. I was surprised because I had just spent the afternoon listening to the podcast This is Living, which she hosts with her husband, the senator Josh Hawley, and on which she describes her decision to fight Roe as “a calling from God”, putting her success down to “the prayers of believers”. On one episode, the Hawleys suggest that where abortion is now illegal their listeners “adopt a mom who is unexpectedly expecting” to help her – and “most importantly, introduce her to Jesus”.

The overt religious agenda of Hawley’s podcast is completely at odds with the legalese she used in court and in the debating chamber. But the ADF itself is more explicit. The CEO’s statement on its website reads: “We will do – as we have done – the hard things to which God has called us with the expectation that He will accomplish His purposes.”