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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.”
This kind of language is no longer solely the preserve of organisations of the Christian right – it has infiltrated the highest offices. The White House’s new “faith office” webpage proudly declares: “In his first week, President Trump pardoned Christians and pro-life activists who were persecuted by the weaponized Biden Administration for praying and peacefully living out their faith.”
The tragic reality is that the “pro-life” Dobbs ruling is killing people. In states where abortion is illegal unless the life of the woman or other pregnant person is at stake, patients are suffering and even dying. Doctors are frightened to give them care for fear of being struck off and even sent to jail. In South Carolina, legislators are trying to pass a bill that would classify abortion as homicide, punishable by the death penalty.
Elsewhere, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has reportedly issued a list of keywords that trigger staff to review science research projects to determine if they violate Trump-issued executive orders. The words “female” and “woman” are on that list, but “male” and “man” are not.
But this isn’t exclusively a US problem – women’s rights are increasingly at risk in the UK and Europe, too. Last year, while doing research for my book Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have, I discovered that from 1861 to November 2022 only three women had ever been prosecuted for terminating a pregnancy in the UK. But in the past two years alone, at least six women have appeared in court and dozens more have been investigated.
It is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks in the UK or without approval from two doctors, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. While it is true that the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol became available to use at home for women before 10 weeks of pregnancy during the pandemic, this change in procedure does not sufficiently explain such a radical increase in prosecutions.
Dr Jonathan Lord, a co-chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) abortion taskforce, has warned that when an unexplained pregnancy loss is suspected of being an illegal abortion, police in some areas are seizing women’s phones to search for period tracking apps and their internet history. There have also been reports that police are drug-testing distressed women who have suffered late-stage pregnancy loss and subjecting them to lengthy and distressing investigations.
Between 2008 and 2017, about $50m of funding flowed into Europe from 12 of the most influential Christian rightwing foundations in the US, according to research by OpenDemocracy in 2019. Neil Datta, the executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, told me there has been a creeping expansion of anti-abortion Christian nationalist groups in the UK since 2013. When same-sex marriage was legalised in the UK and France, these groups went into overdrive and were triggered to hire lawyers and political scientists to learn how to draft laws and bills to fight progressive movements.
“They style themselves as NGOs, thinktanks and, in some cases, political parties,” Datta told me. “But when you scratch the surface, you see religious connections in almost all of them.” Many of these groups originated in the US Christian right, but have now opened offices in Europe, including the ADF’s international subsidiary, operating since 2010, which now has five – including in Brussels, Strasbourg and London. Just this week, an activist in the UK was convicted of breaching a buffer zone outside an abortion clinic. Her case was funded by the UK branch of the ADF.
It doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to suggest that their dream seems to be reflected in the growing popularity of the tradwives of TikTok: white women in gingham baking pies for their six children, bragging about financial dependence and recommending raw milk for fertility. Coincidentally, if you watch enough tradwife content, as I did while researching my book, you start to see advertisements for the ADF. The road to Gilead is circular – once you’re on it, it’s hard to get off.
In late 2024, Nigel Farage was reported to be linking up with the ADF, calling for a parliamentary debate to cut the time limit for abortion in the UK. Elon Musk recently responded to a suggestion from Andrew Tate that he would run to be British prime minister by saying, “He’s not wrong.” Last year I would have laughed at the very idea that we could be under his eye. This year, I’m not so sure.
It is time to fight for what we have. France made abortion a constitutional right in 2024. In January, more than 30 groups in the UK, including the British Medical Association and the Faculty of Public Health, representing 800,000 health care professionals, demanded “urgent action” to safeguard reproductive rights. If we don’t take action now, we could be sleepwalking into a future where neither Erin Hawley nor I may have the luxury of debating in public again. In the meantime, Margaret Atwood put it best: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” – don’t let the bastards grind you down.
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Deborah Frances-White is a bestselling author and the host of the Guilty Feminist podcast. Her new book, Six Conversations We’re Scared to Have, is out on 3 April
