From Roe to Scotland: Protecting our Hospitals from Extremists

After a long and determined campaign by Back Off Scotland, the proposed bill to ban anti-abortion protesters from Scotland’s clinics passed almost unanimously in June this year. The act has since received royal assent and became enforceable from 24th September—a great victory for reproductive rights in Scotland. However, the people of Scotland are not out of the woods yet. Many are aware that Texan organisation 40 Days for Life is responsible for organising the majority of these protests and have still been recruiting ‘volunteers’ to target Edinburgh’s Chalmers Clinic this week.

Far from ‘backing off’, weekly protests have continued at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. Despite the buffer zone legislation, and perhaps strengthened by the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the USA, 40 Days for Life appears more determined than ever to target people outside healthcare settings. They have even published a new book designed to coach people on ‘what to say’ about abortion.

“What to Say When 2” offers a morbidly fascinating insight into the mindset of its authors, Shawn Carney and Steven Carlin, who co-wrote it. The book promises to help the reader ‘confidently defend life’ in the post-Roe era, where many feel ‘ill-equipped’ to do so.

Not even attempting to hide their religious motivations, the book opens by stating that we can ‘all agree’ on original sin. Expecting new arguments in response to the devastation caused by Roe’s reversal, I was surprised to see the book quickly revert to the same old, tired, dangerous rhetoric about women ‘killing babies’. Not only does it compare abortion to slavery, but asserts that ‘slavery is the only good comparison’.

Unbelievably, the book becomes even more unhinged and disrespectful as it progresses. There are numerous comparisons to Nazi crimes—comparisons that Holocaust organisations have repeatedly asked them to stop making. In 2020 40 Days for Life was condemned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust which told The Independent: “It is unacceptable to draw comparisons between the Holocaust and abortion practice. The Holocaust was a unique, identity-based extermination of a people, during which the state-sponsored slaughter of six million Jews took place before and during the Second World War.”

Speaking of minimising atrocities, the authors make wild attempts to suggest that it is racist for black women to have access to abortion, with no consideration of whether it is, in fact, racist for white men to dictate black women’s medical decisions. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the disproportionate maternal death rates affecting black women in America.

Even more absurdly, the book claims that abortion allows rapists and abusers ‘to destroy the evidence’, as if a rape conviction depends on the victim being forced to give birth, and as if that would do anything to prevent the victim-blaming and rape myths so pervasive in our culture.

“Don’t be afraid of being labelled an ‘extremist’ or a ‘Christian Nationalist’,” the authors assert. They even suggest to simply laugh it off when people point out that the anti-abortion movement does little to support children once they are born. According to the authors, this point is so irrelevant that they don’t need to provide a counterargument, though they do offer a dismissive retort: “Environmentalists don’t care about Jupiter.”

The global anti-abortion movement has clearly set its sights on abortion pills, given their safety and how easily they can be transported through the mail. In a sense, the genie is out of the bottle, and they despise it. Desperate women and girls no longer face the horrors of dangerous backstreet abortions, and this infuriates them. They make false claims that abortion pills are dangerous, despite the NHS stating that serious complications occur in only 0.1% of medical abortions. For context, you can easily find the risks of common over-the-counter painkillers such as paracetamol. Carney and Carlin claim that these pills allow women to ‘kill their children at home’, a revealing statement.

They also note that after taking abortion pills, women ‘might need painkillers’. Any woman reading this will roll her eyes—many of us use painkillers to work, raise children, run households, and generally everything while menstruating.

Despite their supposed concern for the safety of medical abortions, they push for so-called ‘abortion reversal’, even though clinical trials of the procedure were abandoned due to women haemorrhaging. In reality the outcomes are the same if a patient simply doesn’t take the second abortion pill and waits.

The authors also use men’s abusive behaviour as an excuse to ban abortion pills. While I fully agree that spiking women with abortion pills would be abhorrent and should result in severe punishment, the more common occurrence of men using drugs to rape women and pregnancy as a means of control is conveniently ignored. NHS midwives routinely ask pregnant women about domestic abuse because pregnancy is one of the most dangerous times in a woman’s life. Recently, Andrew and Tristan Tate have been accused of using pregnancy to control and punish their victims. It is unthinkable that anyone would deny these women the right to terminate such pregnancies.

After many chapters of calling women baby-killers, Carney and Carlin suddenly pivot to attacking LGBT+ people, whom they call a ‘coalition of sexual deviants’. The authors also express paranoia about the success of the ‘homosexual movement’. They obviously fear the potential allyship between cisgender straight women and LGBTQ+ people. Therefore, they, along with the rest of the religious right, seek to stoke division.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the book is its targeting and naming of real women who have suffered due to being denied access to abortion. One Texan woman, Amanda Zurawski, who developed sepsis after a doomed pregnancy and subsequently sued the state, is mentioned in the book. They write that her “experience is a tragedy—but not one that required the killing of an innocent baby” and “Zurawski suffered a life-threatening health condition, but abortion was not the solution.”

Zurawski herself said, “I nearly died because my doctor could not give me the care I needed, and my ability to have children in the future has been forever compromised by the damage that was caused.”

Of all the abhorrent nonsense in this book, for me, the most grotesque was diminishing the suffering of a 10-year-old child rape victim who had to leave Ohio to seek care. Anti-abortion activists are encouraged to ‘ask questions’ like “Nobody would know about this child rape victim if she didn’t have an abortion. Why is that?” or “How did the rapist illegally enter the country?” or to enquire why having to travel for care was the worst part for the victim. There is absolutely no regard for this child’s health or the dangers that pregnancy poses for children.

What to Say When is an extremist handbook written by overconfident men who greatly overestimate their intellect. In truth, it reads like the work of teenage edge-lords on a Reddit thread. It is neither clever nor empathetic. It is exhausting and disgusting.

These men, along with their allies in Scotland, such as the Paisley Diocese, which actively recruits protesters on their behalf, have caused enough pain and suffering. I hope anyone protesting later this month feels the full force of Scotland’s long-overdue buffer zone laws.