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Across the UK, there has been an increase in anti-abortion activism outside abortion clinics. The activism deployed includes explicitly religious activities such as 'prayerful witnessing' and 'pavement counselling', which aim to discourage women from entering clinics. This article stems from a wider ethnographic study of public activism over abortion to determine what claims about motherhood are being made within these debates. Two arguments are presented. First, how women's role as mothers is central and essentialised in anti-abortion discourses, with the body of the mother often disappearing as activists seek to erode the distinction between a foetus and a baby by constructing pregnancy as a foetal environment. Motherhood is constructed as 'natural' and sacred, therefore abortion must be damaging because it destroys women's 'natural' position. Second, the article argues that although the activists' arguments are always religiously framed, their activism takes place in a largely secular context, meaning that they have to find ways of appealing to secular audiences. This leads to a complex interrelationship between secular and religious discourses, where theological viewpoints sit alongside 'scientific' claims to buttress activists' views. This article explores how the presence and absence of mothers within activists' narratives is due to the tensions between religiously based understandings of motherhood, and the need to appeal to a secular audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, there is evidence of a recent increase in anti-abortion activism outside clinics. In response, abortion service providers have called for the introduction of 'buffer' zones to protect women from 'harassment' while accessing abortion services. Drawing on two datasets – extensive ethnographic fieldwork, and a content analysis of clinic client comment forms – we deploy Goffman's concept of 'civil inattention' to further our understanding of the material practice of anti-abortion clinic activism. We find that although anti-abortion activists understand their own actions to be supportive, practices of religious observance outside clinics inescapably draw attention to the site and to the act of accessing healthcare, inherently challenging normative expectations of privacy and confidentiality. Our analysis suggests that anti-abortion activism outside clinics consequently violates social rules governing encounters with strangers in specific places and reinforces gendered hierarchies. As such, they are often experienced as acts of gendered harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, narratives about saved women and babies have been a significant feature in anti-abortion campaigns to oppose bufferzones, which seek to prevent anti-abortion activists from being directly outside abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists argue that without their presence, the 'abortion industry' will fail to seek 'informed' consent and coerce women into abortions. These presumptions are based on positioning abortion, and service providers, as inherently 'evil', whilst saving is rooted in Christian beliefs aimed at ensuring that souls go to heaven. This paper emerges from ethnographic research in Britain on anti-abortion activism and pro-choice counter-demonstrations. Highlighting the importance of saving in many of the anti-abortion campaigns, it will argue that as they have a different conceptualisations of harm to pro-choice activists, this leads to a lack of understanding of each other's saving narrative. Yet to some extent they both draw on a positioning of women as potentially vulnerable and at risk from the actions of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]