Sian Norris reports on plans for the provision of new services by a group which links abortion with Satanic Ritual Abuse, believes delaying abortion decisions is justified, and also associates it with suicide
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The anti-abortion organisation, the Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, plans to launch a new “missional network of pregnancy support” – raising questions about the regulation of anti-abortion pregnancy advice in the UK.
CBR UK’s network “expands through a HOPE Pregnancy Help-line and HOPE Pregnancy centres” and will offer “support and advice” to women facing an unwanted pregnancy.
The organisation hit the headlines in 2019 when it displayed graphic imagery outside Labour MP Stella Creasy’s constituency office in Walthamstow, north-east London – including an image of an aborted foetus. That same year, CBR UK activist Christian Hacking was arrested outside a Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London, for breaking a Public Space Protection Order – although the charges were later dropped. In 2012, directors Andy Stephenson and Kathryn Attwood were arrested outside a clinic in Brighton while operating under the name Abort67. They were cleared over public order offences.
Throughout 2020, CBR UK has continued to run its ‘educational’ displays across the UK.
This UK branch of the US Center for Bio-Ethical Reform holds extreme anti-abortion views, including the bizarre belief that abortion is linked to Satanism. In a recent interview between Tomi Aroyami and CBR UK directors Stephenson and Wilfred Wong, Stephenson told Aroyami that “Satanic Ritual Abuse and Satanism is that love of death – and what could you get a more, sort of, institutionalised out working [sic] of that than abortion”.
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Wong claims that Satanists are involved in the “abortion agenda, the LGBT agenda, they are involved in sex education”. He also states that Islam and Satanism share a common goal, “which is destruction of Christianity”, while repeating a myth that changing demographics mean that Christians are starting to become outnumbered by Muslims in the EU. At a CBR UK training event in 2019, Wong defended ‘prayer vigils’ outside abortion clinics, arguing that they were necessary as prayer can prevent an abortion from working.
These views echo the spread of a Satanic abuse conspiracy theory in the run-up to the 2020 US Presidential Election via QAnon and the Save The Children movement. The theory falsely states that Democrats and ‘liberal elites’ traffic children through underground tunnels to be abused in Satanic rituals. References to abortion being “demonic” also appear on extreme misogynistic forums.
A video posted on CBR UK’s Facebook group gives some insight of its approach for the HOPE initiative. Called Hope Before Abortion (the original name for the planned service, now updated on its website to ‘Hope For Women’), it offers “some guidelines on how to shape the conversation when speaking to women and men in an unexpected pregnancy”.
These include the assertion that the only reason a woman may seek an abortion is “fear” and “for the mother to allow a baby to die in her womb, she must first allow it to die in her heart”.
The video’s presenter Kathryn Attwood suggests showing the pregnant woman “what abortion will do to her baby using pictures and videos” and encourages the viewer to “share the facts of abortion.”.
Currently, the CBR UK website directs women who are pregnant to view a graphic video to see “what a ‘termination’ or ‘ending your pregnancy’ actually is”.
Rachael Clarke, head of policy and public affairs at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), explains that women with an unplanned pregnancy “need to be able to trust those caring for them to provide evidence-based, impartial, non-directive information about their options”. Needless to say, being directed to watch a graphic surgical video does not meet this standard.
Crucially, in the video, Attwood advises the trainee to break “into the rush of abortion decision-making and encourage her to take her time”.
This delay tactic is commonly used by anti-abortion crisis pregnancy services, including the US organisation Heartbeat International. Earlier in 2020, Heartbeat International briefly listed the HOPE service as one of its affiliates on its worldwide directory, however it has since been removed.
Heartbeat International offers training webinars to staff and volunteers at crisis pregnancy services advising them to “get the caller to slow down”. The webinars claim that women are more likely to experience “emotional complications” if they “make the decision too quickly”. CBR UK points women who have an unwanted pregnancy to the Heartbeat-run Options Line.
Heartbeat International has also been accused of sharing disinformation about the mental health impact of abortion – echoed by CBR UK.
Attwood refers to “the deep, painful impact abortion will have on [a woman] for the rest of her life” and its sister project PASE cites anti-abortion activist David C Reardon’s claims that abortion is linked to suicide. The NHS explains that a woman ending an unplanned pregnancy is “no more likely to experience mental health problems” than if she continues with it.
Clarke described the move of CBR UK into “pregnancy support” as “worrisome”.
“This group has one purpose – and that’s to stop women accessing abortion services,” she said. “We have absolutely no faith that people who have, up u