Media Storm - What does anti-abortion and white supremacy have in common?

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Funding, for one thing. Political frontmen, for another. The question is why Money trailing into Far-Right groups connects European aristocrats with US Christian evangelicals and Russian propagandists. Together, these vastly different interest groups support joint campaigns undermining migrant rights with one hand, and abortion rights with the other. Connecting the dots between them, is a debunked White Supremacist conspiracy theory called ‘The Great Replacement’. It argues that White Europeans and Americans are being deliberately seditiously replaced by non-white migrant populations, and that the solution is not just closing borders, it's forcing up White birth rates— and forcing down abortions. Sian Norris is an investigative journalist exposing these dirty money trails, and she joins us on Media Storm. She says that while wealthy European aristocrats, hardline American Christians and Russian disinformationists may seem very different on the surface, each is incentivised to subscribe to a fascistic mythic past in which White people were superior to others and women’s bodies were controllable and for childbirth. As a result, absurd and extremist worldviews have entered mainstream politics. How normalised is White Supremacism today? How does it threaten women’s bodily autonomy? How have legacy news outlets helped to make extremism mainstream? This week’s episode brings together the different fights against two far-right frontiers: immigration and abortion. Subscribe to our ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi Helena. Hi, Matilda. Show me your new tattoo. Have you still got the film on? I haven't. I took the film off last night. I've still got the film on mine. It's at 24 to 48 hours. Yeah, and it's been between 24 and 48 hours

since we got our matching media storm tattoos. I still think I win. What do you win at? The 48 hour, keep your film on ADHD test. It was really painful to rip off, so have fun doing that later. Should I do it now? It's like a second skin.

Don't do it now because you have to go and wash it and we don't have time. We really don't have time. We need to record. So let's go on with the episode. But that's the update from our week. We have matching media storm tattoos. Go to our Instagram if you want to see what they look like. Hell of now.

Today's episode, you've been wanting to do this deep dive for a while. Tell us why. Well, when we first did a deep dive into abortion, it was 2022. So it's been a few years and it's always. good to revisit topics because we're in such a fast-moving and ever-changing world. In our 2022 episode, we spoke about abortion reporting in the media and how the media is not always reflective of popular attitudes towards abortion, which are generally pro-choice. We were joined in this episode by Renee Bracey Sherman, founder of We Testify, and hailed

as the Beyonce of Abortion storytelling. To discuss why abortion is still seen as taboo in the mainstream media. Now all of that is still hugely relevant and we will discuss some of the same things today. But there's something else that we need to look out for when it comes to abortion and the media now. And what is that? That is the link between anti-abortion and anti-immigration. Okay. Now on first hearing this, it's maybe hard to understand why those two things might link. But it's clear that in some way they do link if we look at who subscribes to each view. these tend to fall uniformly with right-leaning conservative values in terms of who is going to vote against abortion and who is likely statistically to vote against immigration.

Right. But in reality, it's more sinister. And here's where I'll bring in today's guest. So, Sean Norris is going to be joining us. And she's an international investigative journalist based in the UK. And she's the author of Bodies Under Siege, Subtitle, How the Far Right, Attack on Reproductive Rights, went global. Now, when Sean first began investigating the UK's anti-abortion movement, she came across an organisation called UK Life League. At first glance, the group seemed focused solely on opposing abortion, but once she started digging into their language and literature, it was clear that anti-abortion and anti-immigration rhetoric were being fused together. Alongside the narrative that migrants are replacing white British people

runs a parallel narrative that feminists were suppressing the white birth rate through abortion and contraception. Together, these ideas were feeding the same conspiracy theory, the so-called Great Replacement. Okay, for those who are unaware,

the Great Replacement Theory is a debunked white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory that white Americans or yours, Europeans are being actively and deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants. This is not a new concept, but it has turned quickly from a far-right fringe idea into a mainstreamed narrative, helped, we would say, by a mainstream news media that legitimise far-right myths and clichés.

Where we're at today in the UK, for one, is a political playing field in which white victimhood has become so normalised that our shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, claims that white Christian men are being persecuted by our criminal justice system without a hint of irony. Robert Jenrick, earlier this month, was recorded at a Conservative Association dinner complaining that he, quote, didn't see another white face while walking around an area of Birmingham. He was here filming a video for G.B. News. Go figure. A pretty far right news platform in the UK. And it was a video about litter in the suburb. For context, this area of Birmingham recently faced a strike

by litter collectors after its council essentially went broke. It's a relatively poor area with a relatively high concentration of ethnic minority groups. Robert Jenrick told the dinner, quote, I went to Hansworth in Birmingham the other day to do a video on litter and it was absolutely appalling. It's as close as I've come to a slum in this country. But the other thing I noticed there was that it was one of the worst integrated places I've ever been to. In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there, I didn't see another white face. That's not the kind of country I want to live in. So note, okay, he's wrapping it up as if it's about integration, it's not about race. He describes this area as a slum and then says, the other thing, I noticed,

there's no white people, as if he doesn't want the people listening to him to connect those ideas, the slum idea and the lack of white people, right? What he is doing is he's distorting a bin litter strike to feed this far right cliche of the UK being a slum, tying it in with the idea of ethnicity, when really the situation here is that here's an area that has suffered from over a decade of Tory austerity, austerity enforced by a government that he loyally propped up. Yeah, I love he's trying to subtly wrap up his package of racism. Like, babe, it's just racism. But it's less subtle than it was a few months ago.

And it's less subtle than it was a few years before that. And that's how we have this sort of drip-drip normalisation of what is actually increasingly starting to define itself as white supremacism. Right. And at their most extreme, the consequences of those ideas become deadly. Famously in May 22 in Buffalo in New York, 10 black people were shot and killed in a grocery store. The 18-year-old shooter,

a white man called Peyton Eskendron had written a manifesto describing himself as an ethno-nationalist and a supporter of white supremacy and a supporter of the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory. According to a UGov poll that same year, 61% of Trump voters

and 53% of Fox News viewers believe the Great Replacement Theory is true. It's long been used as an undercurrent to roll back immigration measures and it's now being used to roll back abortion rights. I also quickly want to point something out, the organisation that I mentioned earlier, the anti-abortion and anti-immigration organisation called UK Life League,

which Sean Norris investigated for her book. That was founded by Jim Dowson, better known for starting the far right party Britain first. And the story behind this is much more global. Shan follows the money trails linking anti-abortion and anti-migrant. white supremacist groups through the US, Europe and UK. Stay tuned because it is truly wild. Well, with that teaser, we should probably kick this off. Why are political leaders anti-abortion narratives growing?

Who funds worldwide anti-abortion campaigners? And are abortion rights in danger of being rolled back again? I think it's ludicrous that we can allow abortion up to 24 weeks. Lobby for legislation that could put women in general. or worse for getting an abortion. These bans are rooted in patriarchy and white supremacy. Women seeking abortions will be forced to listen to fetal heartbeats. Abortion is health care.

Abortion is healthcare. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson and I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm, what does anti-abortion and white supremacism have in common? Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Well, we're still not back in the studio, but welcome to your own living rooms. We're so lucky to be joined by Sean Norris, an investigative journalist based in the UK. Currently working as the senior investigations reporter at Open Democracy,

she has reported from the UK, Ukraine, Kenya, Bangladesh, Romania and Poland, for The Observer, The Times, The Guardian, Eye News, The Lead and much more. Her first book, Bodies Under Siege, is why we are particularly interested in talking to her today. Welcome to Media Storm, Sean. Thank you for having me. Hi, Sean. I loved reading your book. It's so eye-opening as to how we're heading in the direction we're heading in the state of the world today.

Something, though, that I noticed in your book is that you said you would often be met by bemusement when you tried to explain that the anti-abortion movement is fueled by, white supremacy. However, in recent years, and especially in the last year, fascism seems to have stepped out of the shadows. It feels like a lot more mainstream as an idea. And I wonder whether, since you wrote your book, and perhaps tell us when you wrote your book, you've noticed that political leaders, anti-abortion views and narratives, have become more obvious. Yeah, for sure. So I think, as you say, when I wrote the book is an important part of that. So I started working really on this issue in 2017 when I was reporting on an anti-LGB rights referendum in Romania. And I started to notice how these particularly American organisations were getting very involved in democratic processes

and referendums and votes on gender issues, whether that's LGBT rights or abortion rights, across Europe. And I was really interested then in trying to take the conversation about abortion out of the more traditional, you know, religious morality conversation. You know, we often think about abortion as something around a Catholic church or evangelical churches, but it's about faith, that's about Christianity. And I wanted instead to look at it from a political perspective and say, actually, the fight against abortion is a political fight. And to talk about it in terms of these far-right politics and the rise of fascism and the rise of the far-right across the global north. So that was really where I was coming from. And I started writing

the book in 2020 when I got a deal with Versa and it came out in 2023. And yeah, I think you're Right. Since I've written it, a lot of things have changed. A lot of the things I said were going to happen, have happened, which was disappointing. You know, I didn't want it to be a prediction. I wanted it to be a history book in a way. Obviously, the US is the most extreme example. You know, in 2022, we saw the overruling of Rayview Wade, which allowed for safe and legal abortion nationwide in the states. And immediately state after state kept pushing back and banning abortion. And even when you look at the way in which abortion is spoken about in US politics, you can see this. fascistic notion, these fascistic ideas about women's bodies and migration. So what I argue in my book is that a lot of the backlash against abortion is really linked to a far-right conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, which falsely argues that there is a conspiracy to replace white people in the global north through migration from the global south, and that this is all being aided by feminists who repressed the white birth rate of abortion and contraception and is all being orchestrated by, you know, so-called cultural Marxists.

And it's complete nonsense. There is absolutely no evidence of this conspiracy. Like the data does not bear it out for obvious reasons. But when you look at the ways in which abortion was being spoken about in America in a run-up to Roe v. Wade being overruled, you had a congressman called Steve King talking about American culture being replaced as a result of migration and millions of abortions. We also saw similar rhetoric being used in Hungary where someone talked about like this 20 million missing Hungarians as a result of abortion and immigrants. And so it was really clear to me that there was this far-right conspiracy, far-right rhetoric and far-right language and politics being focused on a women's right to abortion and a women's right to bodily autonomy. And that has definitely risen and become more prominent since I started this research and even since I published the book. And it's very interesting that you bring up Hungary because I don't think that we can have this conversation today without bringing up what is happening in that country. So Hungary is led by Prime Minister Victor Orban. Now, Orban is strongly anti-immigration, very anti-LGB plus equality, and has

implemented many far-right anti-liberal policies. Like many places around the world, Hungary is experiencing declining birth rates, with many choosing not to have children due to financial concerns and lifestyle choices. Orban's government has sought to tackle this with policies encouraging people to have children, like tax exemptions for women with four or more children. children, but these incentives have come at a cost to reproductive freedoms. Abortion is legal up to 12 weeks, but involves mandatory counselling sessions, sessions that reportedly heavily push a pro-life agenda, pro-life. In 2022, the government required women seeking abortions to listen to fetal vital signs,

i.e. a fetal heartbeat. Now, what has this got to do with misogyny? Well, a lot. In 2022, the government released a report which argued that educated women pose a threat to Hungary's birth rate, framing higher education as antithetical to traditional gender roles. It stated that graduates are less likely to marry and have children and expressed concern that feminine traits may be encouraged by university education, leading to a weakening of sexual equality. But what has this got to do with anti-immigration policies? Well, also a lot.

Orban's government has used the great replacement theory to justify strict anti-immigration policies and promote a nationalist agenda. Orban himself has declared Europe is committing suicide by allowing immigration. His government regularly advocate for anti-immigration and a pro-family policy together and host right-wing conferences from the US, including CPAC, the US Conservative Political Action Conference. A CPAC speaker in Hungary proposed banning abortion as a solution to popular problems and immigration. Shan, in your opinion, was Victor Orban the first political leader to blend this anti-immigration rhetoric with anti-abortion measures so strongly? Orban was the first EU leader using replacement language or using the sort of replacement conspiracy theory to push his agenda and actually becoming a lot bolder with the language. that he uses. So I think when you look at speeches in 2017, he wouldn't use the word replacement. That's now over. He happily uses that word. He spoke about wanting to build a Christian

Hungary and a Christian Europe. And again, this is a real code in terms of like, what do we want Hungary to look like? We want it to be white, to be Christian. And he talked about the family protection policy, which is lauded by lots of sort of pro-natalist, right-wing politicians and political thinkers across the world. But it's very much focused on the right kind of family. And I'm using that word advisedly, it doesn't apply to LGBT parents. I mean, there's been a massive backlash against LGBT rights in Hungary. You know, Roma families are excluded from the family protection policy. So again, it's very much about trying to build a version of Hungarian womanhood, a version of Hungarian families that fits into this far right agenda or this nationalist

agenda. And it's been described as, you know, not about protecting families at all, but about a nation-building exercise. You point actually to this kind of contradiction. in the movement that we're looking at today because you emphasise there is a really strong nationalist ideal that runs through it. But it's also very global when we look at how it's spread and how these ideas are shared

between the far-right leaders of the world. Victor Orban, for example, has forged very strong ties with influential right-wing figures in the US. He's been a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show. Donald Trump has been an outspoken supporter of Orban referring to him as a strong man, Elon Musk, met with the Hungarian foreign minister in late 2024 to discuss potential collaborations. You also talk in your book about how Orban is being mirrored by Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party here in the UK. Tell us a bit about the global

incubation of these very nationalistic ideas. I mean, it's really interesting the influence that Orban has on the world stage. You know, it's kind of an outsized influence compared to the sort of economic output of a small or medium-sized country like Hungary and Europe. We do see this global networking between the anti-gender movement and the anti-immigration movement across the world, a sharing of policy ideas, a sharing of platforms, these big international conferences like CPAC. And I think it's actually really interesting because we became very used to thinking about the far-right threat as existing in sort of backrooms of pubs, a bunch of fugs come together. They get drunk, they have a rant, and maybe they have a bit of a punch up.

And it's horrible, but it's quite contained. Now we have a global networked far right, powered by the internet, powered by social media. We have a shared ideology of Great Replacement, a shared belief system that the Great Replacement is going to trigger a civil war, the day X, the boogaloo. You know, the reason Elon Musk tweets so much about civil war coming to Britain is because they have this shared ideology. And they are swapping tactics, they are sharing memes, they are creating a net. networked community that goes right across the globe.

You know, we've got these two sort of mirrors of that, the political side of it, the world leaders, the billionaires like Musk who are giving space to each other, creating platforms to each other, and this extremist online network where you could be sat in your mom's basement in Idaho, chatting to someone sat in their mom's basement in Birmingham, sharing the same memes, pushing for the same outcomes. And that's really scary. And that is the real threat now. It's a very different threat to what we faced in the 80s and the 90s, when as horrific and violent and cruel as that was, there wasn't this global connection between these far-right movements.

I think the next thing we want to talk about is the money here, because you've laid out quite clearly how these radical fascist ideas become normalized and mainstreamed through political campaigning. But all of this campaigning costs money. tell us where that money comes from you've got three main funding sources the first is money from europe and this kind of surprises people because there's a sort of belief that europe would just be nice and progressive if it wasn't for these americans and russians messing around with our politics but europe is doing a pretty good job at funding anti-gender movements itself and far-right movements and so the kind of big spenders in europe are often very oddly linked to big aristocratic foundations who push anti-abortion, anti-LGB causes and fund them.

For example, the Habsburg family were a big anti-gender funder. There's some German aristocratic families that push money into this. A lot of them have links to fascist and far-right regimes of the 20th century. We also see big business funding, banker funding going into this. The second big part of money, unsurprisingly, is from the US. So the United States is one of the major funders of anti-abortion activity. in Europe and around the world. A lot of the money we see comes from religious freedom charities as they like to bill themselves. So Alliance Defending Freedom is one of the big legal

charities in the states really fundamental in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, but also helped get the ban on buffer zones. So they're really important influence. And actually, when you look at how much money they've spent in Europe, they are probably one of the biggest funders of anti-abortion activity in Europe from the States. And they're increasing their spending in UK, and this is something that really should be a massive wake-up call to many of us in a real concern. There's a massive pro-abortion majority in the UK. We have really good pro-abortion policies. We've had a lot of pro-abortion wins, but ADF has increased its spending in the UK to over a million dollars in the last year when it was in the sort of low 100,000s when they first

set up their office. And then the third pot of money, again, unsurprisingly, is from Russia. And this is the money that's the most difficult to track because a lot of it is very, very dark. But one of the big funders of anti-abortion, anti-LGB activity from Russia is a guy called Konstantin Malofiev, who is close to Putin. He actually recently married Maria Lavova Bolova, who is the architect of the child abduction scheme in Ukraine, you know, the war crimes of stealing Ukrainian children and indoctrinating them in Russia. And he has this foundation called the St. Basil, the Great Foundation, which has poured a lot of money into anti-abortion and anti-LGB causes. So those are the kind of big pots of money. That is a lot of information, but you identify three key origins

for the funding of these global anti-abortion campaigns that are all very different. You know, one, you said these European aristocratic families, two, these American evangelical Christian charities, and three, Russia, Russia destabilizing propagandists. These are all three entirely different interest groups on the surface. So, why? Why is it that they all have this shared interest in undermining abortion rights? Well, if you look at the Russia question, they're really interested in trying to create division across Europe. And so they used LGBT rights and abortion rights as a kind of fisher to kind of create

this division between communities and between countries. And with the US, they want to like have their influence. They want to like make the world in their image. They want a Christian Europe in a Christian world. And I think with the European aspect, I think it's quite interesting that we see these very traditional, old school, historic families who once, you know, ran Europe, wanting to reverse progress, reverse modernity and go back to a value system that was in place when they had power. And ultimately, that is what unites all of these interest groups. I talk a lot in the book about how far right policymaking and ideology is focused on. restoring this idea of a natural order. It's this notion that at one point the world was run by

nature and that nature was brutal and it was violent and men were men and they were in charge, white men were in charge. Women were subordinate to men and their role was reproductive and they had to kind of produce the babies to like fuel the violent world. Black people were inferior to white people and LGBT people didn't exist. And all of these sort of drives against LGBT rights, abortion rights, immigration rights, is about recreating this natural order, reversing modernity, taking us back to a pre-enlightenment, pre-progressive, pre-rational moment where everything is ruled by nature and nature is a hierarchy and white men are on the top of that hierarchy. Okay, so it's not just like this deal with the devil where all these different groups see

anti-abortionism as a means to an end. There is, running at the core of this, a deeply patriarchal elitism. Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm sure. There are individuals like Donald Trump who are using it opportunistically. You know, he voiced his support for abortion in the past. Now he's become the architect of one of the biggest rollback of women's rights in our lifetimes. But yeah, I do believe that there is a shared ideology for the nation, for the race, the patriarch. Yeah, Sean, I mean, you've kind of laid out that this isn't a random collection of fringe groups, nor is it a grassroots silent majority.

this feels like a highly coordinated, globally strategic, top-down movement. Also, it's quite subtle sometimes and insidious, right? Like one of the revelations that shocked us in your book is that here in the UK, the charity Life, received £250,000 taxpayer money, but it was raised through the tampon tax, as in VAT charged on period products that the government pledged to give to charities working,

on women's issues. Yet life was founded in 1970 with the explicit goal of making abortion a thing of the past. Yeah, that was really shocking. And, you know, I think life is very good at presenting itself as sort of respectable face of the anti-abortion movement. But when you look at some of its literature, it does spread anti-abortion disinformation. But this is not unique. So last year, I worked on an investigation where we found a World Youth Alliance, which was a big global anti-abortion charity was receiving like a million euros in European Union funding to run a reproductive health, you know, activities for young people around the world. And the founder of WIA, World Youth Alliance, compared abortion to the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide. I mean,

she has extremist anti-abortion views. So, you know, public funding for anti-abortion activity out, we might expect it in the US. Like, I don't know, that feels perhaps more normal, but in Europe and in the UK it's not unknown. Okay, it's time now to look at the media's role. Now, Sean, when you published your book, how much interest did you get from legacy news media in the various countries mentioned in the book? Yeah, I mean, the Guardian gave me a space to write an op-head about women in the movement. particularly focusing on trad wives. Everyone's always interested in the trad wives. So that was

great. Unfortunately, that led to quite a horrific backlash from the far right with a really nasty online abuse incident. Against you. Yeah, it was quite unpleasant. But you know, this is the thing. Unfortunately, when you write about these issues as a woman, you are going to get abuse and backlash. And that's, we shouldn't normalize it, but it's sort of become a horrible part of the job. And I got a lovely review in the Sunday Times, which was really positive and did Women's Hour. So yeah, I felt like that was a really good reception to the book. And I think it did sort of open up this debate to sort of say, oh, okay, abortion isn't just about religion. It is a political issue and the far right is weaponising it. But the horrible side of that is that it has

become more mainstream. And so the alarm is now ringing much more loudly. Even this week, when we're recording this podcast, there was a really fantastic piece in the New York Times. about Farage's relationship with Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-abortion religious freedom charity that I mentioned earlier. So there does seem to be a lot more interest in this issue and a lot more understanding that rights can be rolled back and they can be rolled back very quickly. And the influence of far-right politics

and the influence of far-right politicians on this issue is something we need to be aware of. A key part of the mainstreaming of these views, and this is what we always talk about on MediaStorm and unpack on MediaStorm. is the news media. The media is often drawn to sensationalist ideas, but by turning them into headlines, it legitimizes them and helps to bring them into the mainstream. We can lay this out quite clearly when it comes to abortion. Just earlier this week, the Washington Post ran an article

headlined Trump administration approval of new abortion drug infuriates the right. Okay, So this is about how despite the Trump presidency pledging to combat abortion in the US in many respects, a new abortion drug has just been approved in the country. If you run through this article, the main issue is the voice is included. The first interviews are with two anti-abortion campaigners, a spokeswoman for a group called Students for Life of America, and another spokeswoman for a group called the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. These are the only two people who the Washington Post actually speaks to directly for this story.

The reporter then includes a secondhand statement provided by the White House, sort of their response to the criticisms. Their response isn't, oh, access to this kind of health care is important. Their response is like, oh, the FDA doesn't actually have that much power to fight it. This isn't really our doing. then quotes Trump, calling himself the most pro-life president in our nation's history, before ending with yet another quote from an anti-abortion consultant. So to sum up, there's not a single pro-abortion voice in this article,

nor is there a single voice of anyone who has actually openly had an abortion, who has used abortion drugs like the one in question. The whole framing of the article is therefore implicitly biased. It defines the cause for outrage here as the lack of government accountability, not to the public as a whole, but towards anti-abortion activists exclusively. And the two sides it explores are like the two sides of that, not the two sides of the need from life-saving reproductive healthcare. Sean, I wonder if you see media as playing a key role in mainstreaming the views as you have been describing. Yeah, I mean, that article is bananas. you say, it's even framed, not about the drug being approved, but that the right are annoyed

about it. It's really, really egregious. And I mean, I don't want to, you know, give the UK press more props than it deserves. But I feel like we have got better at reporting on abortion rights in the UK. I think particularly around the Irish referendum to legalise abortion, I remember on Channel 4 News, they didn't do that like, I'm for, I'm against, let's all have a big fight. They were just platform women who would talk about their experiences and that's a much healthier way of talking about the issue rather than let's punch it out. But I think the American media, one of the big problems since the overhauling of Rovey Wade is that talking about abortion is obviously so much more fraught with danger.

You know, if you were living in a state where abortion is banned, you can't then do a story about how you got your abortion because, you know, you could be putting people in trouble, you could be putting the doctors in trouble, or the taxi driver or your friend who advised you where to go. And this does create a vacuum where the only people who are confident about talking about this issue are the antis, because they're winning. They're not going to get into trouble. And I think that's been a massive unspoken impact of the Roe v Wade decision or the Dobbs decision. You know, it's completely silenced conversations about abortion in a really unhealthy and dangerous way.

Thankfully, as I say, we don't have that in the UK because we do have the right to safe and legal abortion. So we can have a more open conversation. But I feel like one of the things we're seeing in the UK, which is really alarming me, is not so much reporting about abortion, but reporting about birth rates and a sudden obsession, particularly in the right wing parts of the press, about birth rates. And not in a like, hey, women don't feel able to have children because of the economic situation or lack of housing or lack of flexible working and how can we make it a more family friendly society for all types of families so that it. women and men can make their own decisions. It's like, these birth rates are looking very bad, women better get on it. And you know, not kind of, and blaming women for the low birth rate. And as soon as we start talking about birth rates, you know, the sort of hairs on the back of my neck rise because, you know, from my research on the far right in abortion, that's where

it starts. That's where the sort of anti-abortion. We need to control women's fertility. We need to stop women having bodily autonomy starts. And so I think that's where we have a real danger zone in the conversation about this in the UK press. Absolutely. That's such a good point. I also want to quickly make a point about the term pro-life, which I think is a pitfall that the US media fall into all the time, but also that the UK media does as well. But if you take this article from the Washington Post, the interviewees are also described with their organisations pro-life or for-life chosen, you know, identifies as students for life America or Susan B. Anthony pro-life America. But even the idea that being. anti-abortion is the same as being pro-life is pretty disputable. I mean, do you think it's journalistic to describe anti-abortionists as pro-life? Yeah, no one should be doing that in this year 2025. We should not still be defining that movement in a way that it prefers to be defined.

I think there are some newspapers where we've been, I mean, in the style guide, it's like you cannot use the term pro-life. Like they are, you know, anti-abortion or anti-choice. I always use the term pro-abortion and anti-abortion, which has been controversial in the past. People are like, how can you be pro-abortion? And like, well, I believe abortion is healthcare and I'm pro-health care. So that's why I use the term pro-abortion. And pro-choice feels a bit of a euphemism.

I wanted to pick up as well on this point. The anti-abortion movement is very, very good at using an inventing terminology. So it's invented the term pro-life when really pro-force birth is perhaps a more accurate descriptor. But one of the big areas of this was the invention of the term partial birth abortion. And this is a term that was created by the anti-abortion movement in the US in around the 90s to refer to really, really late-term interventions when a woman is going to have a still birth. And the only way to save her life is to induce the labour, but the baby is not going to survive. There's no such thing as a partial birth abortion.

It doesn't exist. And yet in the amount of mid-90s, the anti-abortion movement started banging on about this partial birth abortion, partial birth abortion, partial birth abortion, partial birth abortion. And there was a point in the 2016 US election when Trump used the term partial birth abortion in one of the debates. And that was the moment he won the pro-life vote. So they created a medical town that doesn't exist. They created an outrage about something that when it happens is a real tragedy, you know, a horrific medical emergency for a woman with a fatal fetal anomaly whose her own life is at risk. And they created laws around it and they created a narrative around it. And,

you know, it just goes to show the power that they can have with using language. And it's why also I think we need to reject things like pro-life because they're inventing these terms to push their narrative and their agenda and we don't have to accept them. Absolutely. It really is about context and about accuracy. Another example of this, and this time from the UK press, in May this year, Nigel Farage, leader of the far right reform party, said that allowing abortion up to the 24-week limit is ludicrous, saying the law is totally out of date. Here's the clip. I am pro-choice, but I think it's ludicrous, utterly ludicrous, that we can allow abortion

up to 24 weeks, and yet if a child is born prematurely at 22 weeks, your local hospital will move heaven and earth and probably succeed in that child surviving and going on and living a normal life. So I believe there is an inconsistency in the law. I believe it's totally out of date. The current law in England and Wales states that abortion is allowed up to the first 24 weeks of pregnancy and beyond that in certain circumstances, such as if the woman's life is in danger. In the media, there is often so much discussion and focus on the 24-week limit, like we see with Nigel Farage here. But in reality, only about 1% of UK abortions take place after 20 weeks. And these are almost always carried out in exceptional circumstances,

such as severe fetal abnormalities or serious risks to the mother's health. Sean, is this a context that you see missed in our media? And if so, why do you think it happens? Yeah. Again, we're not listening to women. We're not listening to women's experiences. But when we look at the reasons for why a woman is in that situation, they're often really desperate reasons. You know, again, their life or health is in danger, fatal fetal, victims of rape and sexual abuse who just haven't been able to get help because of the trauma that they're experiencing. It's just like these are extreme situations and they're really, you know, we need to have empathy and care for these women, not be stigmatizing them as like,

nobody wakes up in the sort of 24th week of pregnancy and goes, oh, hold on a second. I might have an abortion, actually. We need to actually be realistic. And I was on LBC a couple of months ago around the decriminalization of abortion debate. And it was very frustrating for me because the presenter kept sort of bringing up hypothetical situations or what if a woman decides that she doesn't want to have the baby at 37 weeks? I was like, you know, we're not dealing with reality here. Like the reality is women who are seriously ill, mentally unwell, traumatized in a desperate situation, we need to be dealing with that. And I think the focus, you know, needs to be on women's stories, women's experiences, how have women experienced abortion? What was the situation

for them and telling those stories rather than coming up with like bizarre hypothetical scenarios that don't exist in women's lives. The other thing that annoys me as well, I'm on my soapbox, is we often see abortion stories illustrated by a very pregnant woman. And again, this creates an idea that abortion is happening quite late in pregnancy, when most abortions happen within the first 10 weeks,

when you don't have a very prominent bump. And my philosophy is never to judge any woman for the decision she makes over her own body, whether it's a late-term abortion or really early-term abortion, but we have to be honest, about why women make these decisions and not try and pretend that it's some kind of scandal when a scandal doesn't exist.

In the same speech where Farage called the current abortion laws in the UK ludicrous, he also publicly backed the removal of the two child benefit cap, saying that this would make it easier and cheaper for people to have more children. Now, the two child benefit cap limits support payments in Universal credit and child tax credit to a maximum of two children per family. And this is really interesting that Farage came out with this view because in the past, benefits are not typically a concern of reform supporters, or generally like benefits and welfare is not a priority issue. And Farage historically has never shown particular concern around child poverty or making life easier

for people on benefits. What, Sean, would you say, was Farage's motivation to advocate to remove the two child benefit cap. Yes. So first of all, thank you for defining the cap in the correct way because so many people think that it's for child benefit and not for the tax credits, which creates a lot of confusion. So it's really important, as you say, to like get it right on that. I think Farage, I mean, to me, it feeds into this natalist narrative. You know, I mentioned earlier about my concerns of the UK press focusing so much on birth rates and that's sort of where the abortion conversation could be happening. And what we're seeing with far-right politicians and hard-right politicians is this focus on birth

rates, the role of women to produce the next generation. We do have an ageing population. There is a demographic issue in terms of who's going to manage the care and uphold the economy when we have a disparity. But they're not talking about it in those, you know, terms. If they were, they would be talking about education and health and housing and social security. I mean, we know that reforms wider rhetoric on benefits and welfare is very focused on, you know, British-born, British citizens. How they define British is becoming more and more toxic and openly discriminatory.

So I think that sort of the undercurrent of that announcement has also got a very racialised anti-immigration colour to it because we know that they want to restrict benefits and welfare to a certain. great with people. Thank you, Sean. I do think that that is a really, really worthwhile point to emphasize the connection between this selective position on benefits and the narrative. The false narratives we see all the time coming from this political corner that migrants are being fast-tracked through the UK benefit system. And just to tie the conversations across the Atlantic together, I want to revisit a clip from Renee Bracey Sherman, who is a US reproductive rights advocate who appeared in our media storm episode, which we recorded just after Roe v. Wade was overturned in the U.S. She pointed out that so-called pro-life politicians who voted for legislation undermining

abortion access were not investing and were actually directly voting against parallel legislation for safe pregnancies or for more child support for struggling families. They don't do anything to make sure people have safe pregnancies. And they also do nothing. about the fact that there are so many pregnant people in jail in the United States right now who are shackled during labor. There's no plan to increase access to food for poor families. In the middle of May, there was a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee in our Congress. That hearing, the members of Congress badgered the abortion provider witness and the abortion storyteller witness and the legal witnesses for hours. Right after that hearing,

they went to go vote on a bill that would increase the supply of baby formula. Every single one of them voted no. That was Renee Bracey Sherman speaking on Media Storm back in series two. Now, the point of that episode was to ask how the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. could jeopardize the safety of reproductive rights around the world, including places they are broadly taken for granted like here in the UK. But arguably it's almost had the reverse effect in that it showed the risk of reversing rights is very, very real. And that's arguably a factor in why in June this year, MPs voted to decriminalize abortion in the UK.

This is just one of the many victories for abortion rights in recent years, including the permanent adoption of telemedicine after the pandemic and the introduction of buffer zones around clinics. Sean, do you think that the rest of the world has seen similar strides forwards in terms of abortion rights? So I'm going to do the negative first and then the positive. So yes and no is my answer. I think it's really important to recognise that the Dobbs decision, the overhauling of Ravy Wade, has massively emboldened the anti-abortion movement globally. Like they won the biggest victory that they could imagine.

That has given them a new courage, a new. voice, the fact that we're seeing bigger spending from the US anti-abortion giants in the UK and across Europe, we can't ever ignore that. They have a lot of money and they're spending it wherever they can. But on the plus side, as you say, in the UK, we've seen real strides. I mean, we've won every battle that we've wanted to win in the last six years. France has, you know, talked about adopting abortion into its constitution. It said it was the first country to do so that is not correct. There are countries in the global south that have done that. Argentina decriminalized abortion. That's a bit under threat now because of Malay,

but, you know, a huge success. Countries around Latin America are really leading the way on pushing forward with abortion rights. And I'll finish with a point that was made to me the day that Roe v. Wade was overruled. You know, we were just all in despair, like just this horrific situation. And I spoke to Leah from the Center for Reproductive Rights. And she was like, what you have to remember is that in the 50 years since Roe was introduced, 53 countries have improved access to abortion and only four have rolled them back, the fourth being the US. So the momentum is on our side. You know, we are seeing improvements. Women do have better reproductive rights now than they have in, you know, recent history. I'm sort of saying the last few hundred years. So that is

really important to remember. And I make this point at the end of the book, like, they don't get to win. We can win. Sean Norris, thank you so much for joining us on Media Storm today, just before we lose you. Is there anything that you can plug anywhere our listeners can follow you? Yes, I'm not really on Twitter anymore, but I am on blue sky as Shanishka. And yeah, as we mentioned in the introduction, I'm currently working at Open Democracy, so you can read a lot of my reporting on abortion rights, including the World Youth Alliance, which I wrote with my colleague Suita. Find me there.

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