The anti-abortion UK landscape is shifting, and the force behind it is largely American.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian legal organisation that helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, has tripled its funding to its UK arm in five years. ADF International (UK), registered as Charity 1173195 with the UK Charity Commission, received £1.1 million from its American parent in 2024, up from £324,000 in 2020, according to the charity’s own accounts filed with the Commission. That £1.1 million constituted the vast majority of its total £1.3 million income for the year.
The money is reshaping anti-abortion UK activism, funding legal challenges, lobbying MPs, and staffing a growing operation that now employs nine people in Westminster. Whether it can shift a country where roughly seven in ten adults support legal abortion is another question.
Anti-Abortion UK Funding: Where the Money Comes From
ADF was founded in 1994 by a coalition of Christian conservative leaders. It has since become one of the most influential legal organisations in American politics, spending more than $31 million on foreign activities since 2015, of which $27 million has gone to Europe, according to its IRS filings analysed by openDemocracy. European spending rose from $1.4 million in 2015 to $5.2 million by 2022, following a long history of American influence operations abroad.
ADF’s own donors are largely invisible. Since 2012, it has received more than $133 million from the National Christian Charitable Foundation and $100 million from the Servant Foundation, both donor-advised fundsCharitable accounts allowing donors to make contributions and claim tax deductions while recommending distributions over time, often enabling donor anonymity. that allow contributors to remain anonymous, according to reporting by Democracy for Sale. Other reported funders include the Heritage Foundation, Charles Koch, the Shell USA Company Foundation, and the Morgan Stanley Foundation.
Public donations to the UK charity, by contrast, have been falling. They dropped from £200,000 in 2023 to £117,000 in 2024, according to the Charity Commission filings. The anti-abortion UK operation runs almost entirely on American money.
The UK Operation
ADF International (UK), trading as ADF UK, is based in Westminster and was established in 2015. Its stated charitable purpose is advancing human rights and religious liberty. In practice, its work in Britain has increasingly centred on two fronts: challenging abortion clinic buffer zonesAreas designated around abortion clinics where certain activities are legally prohibited to protect access and prevent harassment. in court, and building political relationships at Westminster.
The organisation now regularly represents buffer zone protesters, lobbies Parliament, attends the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and briefs MPs and officials, according to openDemocracy’s investigation. Its staff grew from three to nine between 2023 and 2024.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated ADF as an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group,” a classification ADF disputes.
The Buffer Zone Strategy
Safe access zones around abortion clinics came into force across England and Wales on 31 October 2024, following Scotland (September 2024) and Northern Ireland (September 2023). The law makes it illegal to intentionally or recklessly influence someone’s decision to access abortion services, obstruct access, or cause harassment or distress within 150 metres of a clinic.
ADF UK has made these zones its primary legal battleground in the anti-abortion UK campaign. The organisation represents Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a Catholic charity worker who was arrested twice in 2022 and 2023 for standing silently near a Birmingham abortion clinic. Police paid her approximately £13,000 in settlement after her acquittal. She now faces fresh criminal charges under the buffer zone legislation that took effect in October 2024, in what ADF describes as the first confirmed prosecution under Section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023. Her court date is set for January 2026.
ADF’s legal framing is deliberate. These cases are presented as free speech and religious liberty matters, not abortion cases. The strategy mirrors the approach that succeeded in American courts: establish sympathetic precedents on adjacent legal principles, then use those precedents to restrict reproductive access. As the Good Law Project has noted, ADF’s clients have also been arranged to meet officials from the US State Department.
Political Allies
ADF’s UK network extends beyond its own legal casework. At the 2025 London March for Life, over half the speakers on the programme had direct ties to ADF, according to the Good Law Project. Speakers included Andrea Williams, co-founder of Christian Concern, a UK organisation that has worked directly with ADF and also campaigns against banning LGBTQ+ conversion therapy.
MP Carla Lockhart, chair of the Pro-Life All-Party Parliamentary Group, has supported ADF cases. Former MP Fiona Bruce received funding from ADF UK in 2023 for a speaking engagement. The connections extend to the Free Speech Union, founded by Tory peer Toby Young, which received $97,930 in 2021 from a charity run by Zachary Kester, the general counsel of Students for Life, another US anti-abortion organisation. This web of alliance-building mirrors traditional political coalition structures. Young himself acknowledged the connection, telling Times Radio that the FSU had “never taken on the case of an anti-abortion protester” because they are “extremely well defended already by organisations like ADF International.”
The relationship with Reform UK and its leader Nigel Farage adds a parliamentary dimension. Farage described proposals to decriminalise abortion as “utterly ludicrous.” In February 2025, US Vice President JD Vance criticised UK abortion clinic buffer zones in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, an unusual intervention that highlighted the degree to which American anti-abortion UK politics has attracted Washington’s attention.
The DecriminalisationRemoval of criminal penalties for an action while maintaining regulatory oversight; distinct from legalization, which explicitly permits the activity. Fight
The immediate political context is a live debate in Parliament. In June 2025, two amendments to the government’s Crime and Policing Bill sought to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales. Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment (NC1) would remove women from the criminal law related to abortion, with backing from over 130 MPs and support from abortion providers BPAS and MSI Reproductive Choices. Labour MP Stella Creasy’s more ambitious amendment (NC20) would fully decriminalise abortion and frame it as a human right, with over 100 MP supporters.
Abortion in England and Wales remains technically governed by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, with the 1967 Abortion Act providing legal exceptions. Women can, in theory, be prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies outside the terms of the 1967 Act. Decriminalisation would remove that criminal framework while maintaining clinical regulation.
ADF and allied anti-abortion UK organisations have been actively lobbying against these amendments. The Good Law Project reported that MPs were “flooded with thousands of emails” opposing decriminalisation, part of a coordinated campaign that drew on networks connected to ADF and other US-funded groups.
Can American Money Shift British Opinion?
The polling suggests a steep hill. An Ipsos survey conducted in May 2025 found that 71% of Britons believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a figure that has remained broadly consistent since 2022. A separate 2023 YouGov survey commissioned by MSI Reproductive Choices found support even higher, with 87% of Britons saying abortion should be allowed.
But there are fissures. The Ipsos data revealed a significant gender and generational gap: only 46% of men aged 16 to 34 supported legal abortion in all or most cases, compared with 76% of men aged 35 to 54 and 82% of men aged 55 to 75. Support was more consistent among women across age groups. There is also a gap between broad support for legal abortion and support for specific proposals: polls have found majorities opposing late-term abortion or full decriminalisation without gestational limits. These gaps often reflect anti-motivated reasoningReasoning away from a conclusion you find unwelcome by actively searching for flaws in the evidence, rather than evaluating it impartially. The direction is chosen before the analysis begins., where people reject information that challenges their existing beliefs.
ADF’s strategy does not require overturning British public opinion on abortion itself. It works at the margins: challenge buffer zonesAreas designated around abortion clinics where certain activities are legally prohibited to protect access and prevent harassment., frame opposition to decriminalisation as moderate, build alliances with sympathetic parliamentarians, and establish legal precedents that gradually expand the space for anti-abortion activity. This is the approach that worked in the United States over four decades, where the movement never commanded majority support for banning abortion but nonetheless achieved the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The differences between the US and UK systems are real. Britain has no written constitution, no Supreme Court with the power to rewrite abortion law through judicial interpretation, and no federalism allowing state-by-state restrictions. Parliamentary sovereigntyThe constitutional principle that the legislature is the supreme law-making authority and cannot be overridden by courts or other institutions. means abortion law is decided by MPs voting, not by judges ruling. The legal architecture that allowed the American anti-abortion movement to lobby its way to a judicial victory does not exist in Britain.
But the British system has its own vulnerabilities. Private Members’ Bills, conscience votes, and free votes on “moral issues” give individual MPs outsized influence on legislation like abortion. A well-funded, well-organised lobby does not need majority public support to block a bill or water down an amendment. It needs relationships with the right MPs at the right moment. That is exactly what the anti-abortion UK infrastructure, funded by ADF’s £1.1 million per year, is designed to deliver.
The Transatlantic Pattern
Britain is not the only target. ADF has spent $27 million across Europe since 2015, intervening in cases from the European Court of Human Rights to national courts in multiple countries. The pattern is consistent: establish local legal entities, fund litigation on religious liberty and free speech grounds, build relationships with sympathetic politicians, and gradually normalise positions that would once have been considered marginal.
The question for Britain is not whether ADF can ban abortion. It almost certainly cannot, given the strength of public support. The question is whether it can slow, complicate, or block reforms like decriminalisation, while making anti-abortion protest near clinics legally and socially acceptable again. The money, the legal infrastructure, and the political connections are already in place. The answer depends on whether the other side of the debate is paying as much attention.
