This article references baby loss.

By 20 weeks, many pregnancies show. You have a bump that moves, heartburn and your best friend is a stretchy waistband. Imagine having a scan then and getting the worst news possible – that the baby you desperately want won’t survive.

Whilst 90% of abortions happen before ten weeks, every year around 3,000 take place when parents make the decision not to keep carrying a child for whom birth will mean death. This week, Reform’s Nigel Farage said it is “utterly ludicrous” to allow abortion up to 24 weeks and that the law is “totally out of date”. His comments don’t exist in a vacuum. The anti-abortion movement is on the rise here, and Trump’s playbook is being used in our politics.

If you see abortion as healthcare, please join our fight to protect access to it as a human right and put it beyond the reach of whoever may be in power.

Those who oppose abortion have learned they get little hearing if they just say no. Instead, they make calls for more ‘safeguarding’, using horror claims that the majority of abortions are done through coercion or ‘at birth’. The fact that abortion isn’t technically legal in England and Wales allows these calls to gain traction: women who experience a late-term miscarriage are being investigated and prosecuted in this country now under nineteenth-century rules, having their sex lives made a matter of public speculation in court.

Indeed, parliament ordered a national investigation into claims that ‘sex selection’ was happening, only for it to show there was no evidence of this at all. This year, the police issued guidance encouraging officers to confiscate phones to check fertility apps and verify gestational ages.

Farage’s comments do not speak of someone who has ever heard the phrase ‘I’m sorry it’s not good news’, but it’s not those parents he’s thinking about. Each of these debates is about forcing women to justify why they want an abortion, and in doing so discouraging them from having one. To stop this, we need to do more than remove the criminal law around abortion. That alone will not protect the safe access zones that mean women no longer have to run the gauntlet of protesters when they go to clinics – a measure the American Vice President himself has demanded we abolish. It will not stop attempts to end access to telemedicine, abortion pills, and demand that women wait to see doctors in person, delaying access even further.

This isn’t the case in Northern Ireland. Just six years ago, there was no abortion provision at all until we won the fight to make access to a safe and legal abortion a human right. Now, in the face of relentless attacks on provision from within the civil service, the health service and politics, the Human Rights Commissioner used this law to take the government to court to ensure services were provided. Those safe access zones? Protected and upheld in court as a human right. Telemedicine is next, with the Secretary of State directly in the dock if women can’t access it.