The rising global far right is violent, racist and misogynistic – and depends on exploiting women.
While many of us associate attacks on women’s bodily autonomy with ultra-religious groups, openDemocracy’s Sian Norris argues that the stripping away of abortion rights is a political issue, rooted in fascistic ideas about women and men. Her book, Bodies Under Siege: How the Far-Right Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global, explains how organisations and individuals obsessed with stopping the “great replacement” are fuelling the assault on reproductive rights, and their success relies on recruiting, and exploiting, women.
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In Solidarity is openDemocracy’s podcast about people, power, and politics. It’s hosted by openDemocracy editor-in-chief Aman Sethi, an award-winning journalist and author of A Free Man. Support the show by visiting openDemocracy.net/donate.
Credits:
Presented by Aman Sethi
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to In Solidarity the openDemocracy podcast about people, power, politics and everything in between.
At a recent editorial meeting, a colleague said something that really stayed with me. She said we are in a time when the fundamental question of what it means to be human is up for renegotiation rights. We thought were self evident rights. We thought we had won questions. We thought we had settled about abortion, about gender, about bodily autonomy, about selfhood, about basic equality between races, genders, religions suddenly seemed to be back on the table for some kind of debate. And I really wanted to understand how we got here.
So I reached out to Sian Norris. Sian is an investigative reporter for openDemocracy and the author of bodies under siege, how the far right attack on reproductive rights went global. In her book, Sian traces the attack on reproductive rights as an entry point to show how fascism came back from the fringes into the mainstream. Welcome to the show, Sian, thank you for having me. Sian, let's just get straight into it. How did you end up writing this book?
So really, it's openDemocracy that is responsible for this book existing. Back in 2017 I'd just gone freelance, and I was looking for stories to write about, and I started to look at eastern and central Europe and see what was going on there, just because I thought it was an underreported part of the world in the UK, and I learned that there was a referendum taking place in Romania on equal marriage rights, and it was a kind of preemptive attack against the possibility of equal marriage in Romania. There's no equal marriage in Romania yet, but this was a way of having a referendum that would amend the Romanian constitution to prevent any sort of future vote on equal marriage.
So I was like, Well, I'm interested in gay rights, I'm interested in LGBTQ+ rights, I'm interested in Romania. So I spoke to the editor at openDemocracy and asked if I could go and report on this? And she said, ‘Yeah, that's fine. Here's some money for a WizAir flight, and off you go’.
And so I did, and I went over to Bucharest, and I spoke to lots of LGBTQ+ activists. And one thing that kept coming up over and over again was the influence of US Christian nationalist or religious freedom organizations in this referendum. And they were talking about how US activists were coming over to Romania, going on these tours to sort of preach against LGBTQ+ rights. They talked about how American organizations were putting in what are called amicus briefs to the government and to the constitutional courts, which are these sort of briefings on why, in this case, LGBTQ+ rights, and particularly equal marriage was really dangerous and would lead to your children becoming alcoholics and mentally ill, all sorts of horrific homophobic disinformation.
And I came home, and I wrote up the story, and it was really a great opportunity to report on this area. Then I started to notice that these same organizations were popping up in other gender debates across Europe. And I remember thinking at the time why are these big American organizations so concerned with a small unsuccessful referendum? This referendum never got its way in Central Europe.
Then they popped up in other countries, in Central and Eastern Europe, when they'd had referenda on LGBTQ+ rights such as on gay adoption or on gay marriage, over and over these organizations just kept rearing their heads. And I realised this was something to investigate. Why are these big organizations getting involved in gender rights and reproductive rights in Europe?
I started to notice how anti-abortion activism, anti-abortion activity, was actually really linked to a lot of far right activity that was happening in Europe and in the UK, and that increasingly anti abortion movements were used, and far right movements were using this language of replacement, of the aliens in our classroom, talking about abortion in terms of white people being replaced. And so this is a clear indicator that anti abortion activism was overlapping with far right, great replacement conspiracy theory. And once I started to put these pieces together, that was really it, the far right have taken this metaphor, but I used to use it about feminism. It was like taking the red pill. Once I saw it, I couldn't stop seeing it, and kind of kept investigating it, and wanted to find out more about how the far right was weaponizing anti abortion movements and how the anti abortion movement was increasingly far right.
I wanted us to take a moment to explore one of the things that you talk about at some length in your book, and I would like if you could talk to our listeners about this, which is that you talk about the, perhaps the misconception that abortion rights and the opposition to abortion rights are questions of religion, right? But your book suggests a different narrative, and it ties this question more clearly to ideas of power and ideas of politics. So could you talk to us a little bit about that?
I think when I set out to write this book, and more generally in my reporting on this issue, I wanted to move the conversation away from thinking about abortion in terms of religion and religious morality. Now, that is not to say that religion does not have a huge part to play in the anti-abortion movement. We know that the Catholic Church, the Episcopalian churches, these churches are very, very powerful in pushing an anti-abortion message. And a lot of anti-abortion movements will talk about opposition to abortion in religious terms. However, if you look through history, and if you look at what is happening today, abortion has always been tied up in politics, and that politics of who controls resources, and particularly who controls women and reproductive resource. So when you look at the 1860s when the US first banned abortion. It was very much tied up in these arguments about rising immigration, increased political representation, increased political freedoms for women. The end of the enslavement of people in the Civil War, all of these political forces were coming together to create the groundwork for banning abortion. There was a real anxiety in the US at the time, as I say, about rising immigration from particularly Irish and some parts of Europe and the Chinese, and there was a real anxiety that women were becoming a bit too bolshy. They were, they were sort of advocating for political freedoms. They wanted the vote. And so this was around the time when we started to see a pushback against women's reproductive freedoms and the ultimate ban on abortion. And I'm going to share this quote with you by a guy called Harold Storer who asked in the sort of run up to the abortion bans, "will the USA be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer upon their loins depends the destiny of the nation". So this isn't about religious objections to abortion. This is a very politicized way of thinking about abortion and resource and who has power.
That is something that definitely makes sense, because religions are full of prohibitions, right? There are many things that are prohibited by many religions, but it's always interesting to me, which of the prohibitions you decide now is the time that this is the single thing that we've absolutely got to reinforce at this moment. And looking at the kind of battle over abortion, or the question of abortion in the context of why it suddenly acquires such incredible salience, is very illuminating. I really like the way that in your book, you kind of find moments where you say, These are the moments that this question is kind of brought back up, and these are the sort of crises that that society is experiencing at that moment. And in your kind of delineation of these crises, you often talk about how these specific crises are crises of masculinity, these are crises of patriarchy. These are moments when patriarchal norms are are under threat, and a certain idea of how society ought to be ordered is up for question. One of the moments of crisis that you identify, which I think speaks most urgently to this current moment is the the financial crash of 2008
And it's interesting that you talk about that, because I happen to be in New York during the 2008 financial crash, and it's very interesting to read your book and to see the financial crisis through the lens of gender and to see the financial crisis through the lens, specifically, of abortion rights.
Yeah, it's about time people started talking about the financial crash, to be honest. It has been completely formative on this entire political moment. Obviously, the financial crash sort of accelerated this sort of dislocation of the white man, as it were, and created this sort of sense of crisis of identity. And when that happens, when you've kind of gone along in life and just been telling yourself ‘if I do what the Neoliberal state tells me - if I go to work and I buy my house and I buy my car and I take out my credit cards and go shopping - I’ll be alright.’ When that promise stops delivering, what do you have left? And then what happened is the far right said ‘what you have left are the old certainties, race, gender and war’.
And it told white men that the reasons for their problems were that woman boss who you don't like, or the migrant who's come to take your job. It was never the Neo liberal system. It was always the scapegoat.
At the same time, the 2008 crash was a sign of capitalism in crisis, and capitalism had kind of been okay with women's emancipation and women's reproductive autonomy for a long time, because it meant that there were more workers and there were more consumers. So women had greater financial freedom, which meant they bought more and consumed more and were part of the capitalist agreement. But when things start to fall apart again they said ‘we have to go back to these old certainties, and we have to scrabble for resources’.
I want to take a moment here to shift gears slightly and talk about the why of conspiracy theories. There is a lot of research on how these theories spread, but I'm interested in what people get from believing in them. It seems to me that a lot of these conspiracies have become almost like a religion of their own, where these theories create a sense of belonging and maybe validate people's pre-existing beliefs?
Yeah, I think they do create a sense of belonging. I think it's quite interesting to think about that in terms of the far right, because, as I say, I don't see the far right now as a sort of movement of people coming together and hanging out. It's again, this very online, very networked, international sense of organizing. But when you look at some of the sort of more extreme subcultures, like the incels, I think that was always a sort of sense of this is a place for men who feel that they don't belong, and they can belong here. But then that sense of belonging is around hate. They are belong around hate.
For those of us who perhaps don't know what an incel is, you want to just quickly tell us,
If you don't know what an incel is, turn off now your life will be better without knowing this fact. So incels are ‘involuntary celibate’. That's what they call themselves, and it's an extreme misogynist subculture that happens on internet forums, and it has been responsible for numerous misogynistic terrorist attacks.
But there was a lot of conversation in the rise of the incel movement around young men trying to find community and a sense of belonging, but again, looking for it in all the wrong places. And I think the other thing about kind of belonging in conspiracy theories is, I think people can feel that they're always getting it wrong, and then the far right goes, 'Hey, we've got the answers'. There was a meme that was doing the rounds that basically said, if you've got a question on the left, people say ‘you need to educate yourself - Google is your friend’, and the far right says, ‘come on in, we've got all the answers’. When people have that sense of maybe feeling a bit dislocated, or a sort of resentfulness that they’re ’getting it wrong’, and then a group comes and offers you a sense of community and belonging, that can be quite intoxicating in itself.
One of the things that you talk about in the book is, of course, the fact that this is predominantly a crisis of patriarchy. But there is a chapter in your book that talks about why women find themselves in these movements.
So first of all, the far right needs women that's really crucial to them, because number one, as you say, the far right, is a fundamentally misogynistic, white supremacist, male supremacist movement that believes women are subordinate and inferior to men, and it's intensely racist and it's intensely violent. When you put some women in there you soften that image, you make it look like you're not quite so misogynistic because you've put a woman on a stage or, look women are involved. So how bad can it possibly be? It's pretty bad.
In order to recruit women into the far right, they had to play a trick. They had to tell women that feminism has ruined their lives, and they created this idea of the white goddess, and the idea that women are kind of amazing, beautiful, silent goddesses, and that if you join the far right, these men will adore you, and they will love you, you won't have to work, you won't have to think, you'll just be looked after, you'll be cared for, and everything will Just be so easy for you. And that's quite tempting, isn't it? Like, life's really exhausting, politics is hard!
There’s this lie about feminism, that women can have it all, and obviously that translated into women doing it all. Now, feminism was never about women having and doing it all, that was just a capitalist sort of distortion of what feminism was saying. Feminism was always about giving women the choices and autonomy over their own bodies. Then they've recruited these women into the far right, and they become like the foot soldiers of the movement in terms of how we think about women.
This really comes back again to the abortion question. Because of the great replacement, because of this idea that white women need to be the wombs of the nation, far right female influencers go big on having babies, Ayla Stewart is probably the most famous example of this, she set the white baby challenge, which was ‘I've had six who can beat me?’
You had women on far right forums talking about how they were going to have six babies, because that is above replacement levels of 2.4, Then you have the Trad Wife movement, and it's a source of constant frustration to me and all other women who write about the far right that the Trad Wife movement has been treated in the media as sort of fluffy, focusing on ‘look at these women in their floral dresses’, and not engaging with the fact that it's really rooted in far right ideas about womanhood. These ideas that women are supposed to be subordinate to their husband or the patriarchal authority in the home, whether that's husband or father, that women are supposed to be tied to the domestic, they're supposed to be pinned to reproduction, and that you no longer have any rights over your own body.
One of the things that's really crucial to me whenever I talk about any of my work is that we need to focus on reproductive justice. Women should be able to have the families that they want to have, whether that's having an abortion or having 20 children, having the support and that the choices to make your family as you wish it is what matters. And unfortunately, the far right has kind of co-opted some of the language around motherhood, around maternity, around even flexible working for mothers, and we really need to fight back against that as a feminist movement, because it is the way that they recruit women into a movement that hates them.
I've been thinking about the final chapter of your book where you talk about this idea of a tipping point, on the one hand, it kind of foregrounds this idea of agency, which is that the world doesn't need to look like this. Society doesn't need to look like this. And I was wondering how you analyze this current moment, because at times I'm like, it's all going to hell. How does one retain a sense of sanity? How does one retain a sense of solidarity? How does one retain a sense of possibility in a moment like this? And where do we go from here? And do you feel that the fork is still there, or do you feel like a path has been chosen?
I guess I feel less optimistic than I did even in June 2023 because America is always the big one and when Roe went that was the big one. When we see the rise of the far right in America, it feels very fundamental, because we feel much closer in the UK to America than perhaps we do to other countries. And I don't think that that's actually the right attitude. I think we need to think much more globally, and not just see everything through the lens of countries that start with a U.
There's a whole world out there that we should be more engaged with. But I do always believe in having optimism, because we, and I make this point in the book, we've been here before and we won. As I mentioned earlier, when we look at the sort of 1860s backlash against women's rights that came back when women won the right to abortion. When we look at the last few years in the UK, we've seen decriminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland, we've seen the introduction of buffer zones, we've seen the extension of telemedicine for abortion care. Everything that we have asked for in parliament over the last few years on abortion, we have won. And so things are, in many ways, moving in the right direction.
I also often think that I have the best job in the world, and that's not just to flatter my boss, who's running this podcast, but whenever I feel really down, I'm the person that can pick up the phone and speak to an abortion activist in rural Kenya who's helping young girls get information about contraception and sex education, or I can talk to someone who's helping women in Poland leave the country so that they can actually access abortion care.
When we look at the rest of the world, we can see real improvements in women's rights happening. When Roe was overruled with the Dobbs decision, I spoke to the Center for Reproductive rights, and they reminded me that in the 50 years since Roe 53 countries had improved access to abortion rights, and only four had rolled them back, and that included America and Poland. So that's going in the right direction. I never thought we'd see abortion decriminalized in Ireland when I was growing up. I never thought we'd see abortion decriminalized in Argentina. And yet, the amazing energy of feminists and activists around the world is creating change on a local level, but also on this international level. And so that does give me hope.
I guess I do have a lot of concern - and again, this comes back to 2008 - that we've seen this real erosion in trust in democracy, and erosion of trust in the sort of international order and norms. That comes from a good reason, a lot of the time governments lie to you, bad things happen. But of course, what we're seeing with Trump, and what we're seeing with Orban, with Putin, what we're seeing with authoritarian leaders all over the world, is this idea that you cannot trust the old ways. You cannot trust democracy, you cannot trust the rule of law, you cannot trust society. You can only trust me. I will save you. The big, strong man with my big guns. And so I think we really have to work hard to restore trust in democracy.
Again, I've spoken about the sort of incredible energy of women's movements. Also you look at the sort of generation of climate activists, these incredible young, often women, but also young men who are doing really important work in raising awareness. And, of course, it's terrifying and existential, and things feel like they are really going in the wrong way. But people aren't sitting down and taking it, they are still standing up. They are still fighting back.
Whenever I feel like everything's doomed, I just think of when I was in Kenya in 2022 on this - and I don't want to sound stereotypical - but it really was a dust road in this little village, talking to this activist who spends his whole life supporting LGBTQ+ young people and providing sex education for young teenagers in rural villages. And you think, yeah, that's where change is happening, and that's why change is going to happen. It's not all about the White House gossip or the Westminster gossip. It's what people are doing on the ground to improve the lives of their communities.
