Julie Ward on reproductive rights
Bodies Under Siege – How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global by Siân Norris published by Verso
The updated version of Siân Norris’ 2023 book “Bodies Under Siege” paints a worrying picture of the ongoing attack on sex and reproductive rights in the Global North, fuelled by misogyny, right-wing conspiracy theories, Christian fundamentalism and the cult of white supremacy. Norris is one of the few prescient journalists who could clearly see what was coming down the line with Trump and accurately predicted the devastating 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court challenge that had guaranteed abortion rights across the United States.
Norris’ intention in returning to this work is rooted in a mission to demonstrate the power relationships and patterns of influence that underpin continuing attacks on abortion rights, emanating from radical, neo-fascist ideas about women’s bodies, and now normalised in mainstream politics.
Her central claim – that the far right sees abortion bans as a way to reverse the so-called Great Replacement – might seem far-fetched to many, but to those of us working at the forefront of women’s rights and gender equality, Norris states the obvious. Farage, for instance, went from suggesting a woman’s place was to clean behind the fridge to more recent pronouncements about limits on abortion. It’s a short step to an American-style rollback of our rights championed by wealthy friends in ultra-right think tanks. The fact that Reform’s former Head of Policy, James Orr, is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge University is also telling. This will not end well for anyone who is “other”.
In a world where 90 million women of reproductive age live in countries where abortion is prohibited altogether and where approximately 50,000 women die following unsafe abortions each year, we count ourselves lucky, but we should never be complacent. Norris’ wake-up call came in 2017 when she was sent to Romania to report on a constitutional referendum on LGBT+ rights and realised that the ‘family rights’ rhetoric, racist conspiracy theory, organised misogyny, and fascistic notions of a so-called “natural order”, were all contrived to reverse progress on reproductive and sexual rights.
Looking beyond the borders of Romania Norris saw repeated anti-gender and anti-abortion campaigns taking place across Europe. When the issue was put to the test in Eire in 2018, progressives won the day but not without a huge mobilisation against the same international anti-abortion networks hell-bent on restoring the “natural order”. Namely, whereby straight white men reign supreme, and women belong only in the bedroom and kitchen as baby-making and nurturing machines whilst people of colour are considered inferior and LGBT+ people need to be cured.
Norris posits that whilst rooted in Christian fundamentalism, the right-wing ideology driving the anti-abortion, anti-gender campaign is also inherently racist and speaks of ‘white genocide’ unless something is done. It’s the language of Tommy Robinson, Reform and Restore with their ‘stop the boats’ obsession. It echoes the dehumanising language that Cameron used when he talked of swarms of refugees and migrants, and the language of myriad small-minded sexist and racist blokes who now sit on councils across the country with their hapless women peers in Reform. Shamefully, Labour is not immune to the poisonous drip-feed which paints those fleeing unsustainable lives in the Global South as responsible for creating an ‘island of strangers’ (Starmer, 2025).
Cut to 2019 and Norris goes undercover as a young anti-abortion activist attending a training seminar in London where she meets organisers who claim that abortions are satanic blood rituals. Whilst many view such people as belonging to fringe groups, Norris shows how these extreme ideas have moved into mainstream politics via fascist thought architecture and conspiracy theories that aim to take us back to feudal times. Norris engages with online message boards and forums where she encounters the QAnon movement, Red Pill and incels who are committed to defeating feminism. The journey from these perceived fringe groups to respectable men in suits in the corridors of power is surprisingly short. The book includes case studies from Europe and the USA which demonstrate effective far-right infiltration into institutions such as the UN and the European Parliament, backed by big money, including Russian roubles.
Norris touches on the culture wars and anti-migrant rhetoric whipped up by the Brexit campaign, before focusing the reader’s attention on the roots of the crisis in 2008, which created a fertile breeding ground for far-right racist ideology supported by corporations and the wealthy. It’s a bleak picture, but Norris suggests that we do not have to accept this war on women’s bodies. Understanding how the pipeline of malevolent influence works is the first step to the fight-back. As the late Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free. But first of all, it will piss you off”.
To find out more about Norris’ investigative work, visit her website.