We've defended reproductive rights from religiously motivated restrictions since our founding.
Religion should not stand in the way of reproductive healthcare.
A desire to restrict reproductive rights, and to control women's bodies, is a hallmark of religious fundamentalism. We strongly support the right of women to have legal and safe abortions and access to emergency contraception.
Since its founding the National Secular Society has supported reproductive rights. In 1878 our founder and vice-president were prosecuted for making information about birth control accessible to working class women.
Throughout the world, reproductive rights are still under threat from theocrats. While individual religious people hold diverse views on abortion, every stage of progress in reproductive healthcare has been fought by religious organisations. Often these have involved virulent campaigns of intimidation and misinformation.
84% of people in the UK believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This includes 76% of religious people and 94% of nonreligious people.
In the UK, emergency contraception can still sometimes be difficult to obtain. Some religious pharmacists have defied General Pharmaceutical Council guidance by refusing to sell it or even to dispense a prescription given to a woman after a consultation with her own doctor.
People of all religions and beliefs can have disagreements on the boundaries of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. However, religious beliefs should not be used to restrict the bodily autonomy of other people.
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Latest updates
Vatican back in charge in Spain as Government promises to roll back abortion reforms
Posted: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 12:27
Spain's new right-wing government, headed by the People's Party, has announced that it will seek to reform the nation's abortion law, which permits abortion on demand during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, and allows minors to obtain the procedure without parental permission.
According to Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, the previous legislation, enacted during the secularist Zapatero era, was approved "without consensus and with the unfavorable opinion of the agencies that were consulted."
But Senor Ruiz-Gallardon was unable to say how far the abortion laws would be rolled back – but Catholic anti-abortion groups are hopeful that there will be a major repeal of women's right to choose.
The news of the new initiative was greeted with glee bySpain's largest pro-life organization, Right to Life (Derecho a Vivir), which sees this as a step towards its (and theVatican's) ultimate goal of making abortion completely illegal.
The Coordinator of Right to Life, Gador Joya, says the new initiative is "good news" because "it seeks to restore parental authority, which is violated by the current law," wrote,. However, he added, "the proposal is still very vague, so we will be very attentive to what happens, because we are not renouncing our fundamental objective, which is the complete elimination of abortion."
Abortion counselling amendment to sneak in through the back door
Posted: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:16
This week, Nadine Dorries MP failed to get a second reading for her amendment proposing that abstinence teaching should be promoted in schools - but only to girls, which we wrote about here.
Now the Government has been accused of pushing ahead with her plans to strip abortion providers of their role in counselling women despite her amendment on the issue suffering a heavy defeat in the Commons last year.
MPs voted by a majority of 250 to reject Ms Dorries' amendment in September. It was intended to make women to see 'independent' counsellors before they have an abortion rather than be advised by abortion providers like Marie Stopes International or the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.
Public health minister Anne Milton said just before the vote that the Government would try to implement the spirit of Dorries' proposal without the need for legislation. She said: "The Government supports the spirit of the amendments, and we intend to present proposals for regulations after consultation."
It now appears that this is exactly what has happened.
Shadow public health minister Diane Abbott said she had walked out of a new cross-party abortion group set up by the Government to look at the issue of counselling following the defeat. She said: "I now believe the 'consultation' will be a front for driving through the anti-choice lobbyists' preferred option without legislation or a debate on the floor of the House."
As we wrote in Newsline at the time, allegedly independent bodies of the kind promoted by Ms Dorries do in fact have a strong religious agenda and use a wide variety of manipulative, emotive and factually wrong tactics to talk women out of having abortions. We also wrote about how Ms Dorries manipulated facts in support of the amendment.
Nadine Dorries is on record as saying that her political blog is "70% fiction and 30% fact" and that "I have chosen the facts I wish to believe".
