SNP Cancellations Raise Concerns over Coerced Abortion Debate

A United Nations expert has called for the criminalisation of coerced abortion, and Scotland’s own legal advisers acknowledge gaps in existing protections. Yet the SNP has excluded a discussion of the subject from its national conference because of objections to the organisers’ pro-life convictions.

The Scottish National Party’s cancellation of a conference event examining coerced abortion has developed into a dispute over freedom of expression, political intolerance and the protection of vulnerable women. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children is instructing solicitors, while Bishop John Keenan, President of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, has challenged the exclusion. Behind the controversy lies a question of considerable moral and legal importance: can a political culture which claims to defend reproductive choice accommodate serious scrutiny of the circumstances in which women are pressured into abortions they do not want?

There is something profoundly revealing about a political controversy in which the identity of those raising a safeguarding concern becomes more objectionable than the concern itself. Scotland’s governing party has withdrawn permission for a discussion of forced and coerced abortion at its annual conference in Aberdeen, not because the subject is fictitious, nor because the law has conclusively resolved it, but following objections to the pro-life convictions of the organisation responsible. The decision comes barely four months after a United Nations Special Rapporteur explicitly identified coerced abortion as a form of violence against mothers and recommended its criminalisation. It comes, moreover, while the Scottish Government possesses an expert report acknowledging that existing criminal provisions may not cover every instance of reproductive coercion. The juxtaposition warrants more than a passing expression of astonishment.

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children had arranged a fringe discussion for Saturday 17 October under the title No Law to Protect Her: The Reality of Coerced Abortion. The event, featuring an all-female panel, was intended to examine the pressure exerted upon women to terminate wanted pregnancies and whether Scottish legislation affords them sufficient protection. Its inclusion in the official conference programme was not clandestine. SPUC had been in correspondence with organisers since August, and the published programme described the event’s intended purpose. On 10 October, Young Scots for Independence passed an emergency motion condemning its inclusion. Women for Independence subsequently organised a petition demanding cancellation, supported by SNP politicians including Emma Roddick and Karen Adam. By Sunday 11 October, permission had been withdrawn.¹

The SNP’s stated reason deserves attention. A spokesperson explained that concerns had been raised by members and that the party wished its conference to be somewhere everyone could feel comfortable. The original decision to permit the event was therefore judged mistaken.² Political parties are entitled to determine their own conference programmes, and there is no automatic entitlement to address their members. Yet the explanation offered here is unsatisfactory because it identifies discomfort rather than any substantiated defect in the proposed discussion. It is entirely possible to disagree profoundly with SPUC’s moral position while recognising that the coercion of pregnant women merits examination. The two propositions are not mutually exclusive.

Indeed, the conference booklet itself contained a disclaimer explaining that assistance in arranging fringe events did not imply the SNP’s endorsement of their organisers or speakers.¹ That qualification is significant. The distinction between providing an opportunity for discussion and adopting the opinions expressed was already established in the party’s own arrangements. No reasonable delegate needed to imagine that permitting a discussion of reproductive coercion constituted an endorsement of SPUC’s entire programme. Nevertheless, objections to that programme were sufficient to secure the event’s removal.

Women for Independence maintained that SPUC’s opposition to abortion, contraception and aspects of sex education made its participation unacceptable, arguing that restrictions advocated by the organisation would themselves interfere with women’s reproductive autonomy.² This position deserves to be reported accurately. Its supporters were not claiming that coercion is desirable, and it would be irresponsible to attribute such a belief to them. Their objection concerned the credibility and wider aims of the organisation seeking the platform. But credibility is properly assessed through the evidence presented and the arguments advanced. A campaign group’s convictions may explain why it investigates a particular injustice; they do not establish that the injustice does not exist. Nor do they justify abandoning scrutiny of the problem.

On 16 October, SPUC announced that the SNP had refused to reverse its decision. SPUC Chief Executive John Deighan had written to his SNP counterpart, Callum McCaig, requesting reinstatement, but the party maintained its position. The organisation is consequently instructing solicitors and has announced a demonstration outside the conference venue for 17 October.³ SPUC believes the cancellation may engage protections under equality legislation, although whether any legal claim is sustainable remains to be determined. The distinction between seeking legal advice, initiating proceedings and establishing unlawful discrimination should not be obscured. Whatever the legal outcome, however, the substantive questions surrounding coerced abortion remain unanswered.

Bishop John Keenan, Bishop of Paisley and President of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland, has now intervened, warning against a public culture in which unpopular opinions are excluded rather than examined. He observed that pro-life organisations are increasingly encountering cancellations because others disagree with them, and cautioned that allowing the loudest voices to determine who may speak risks leaving important questions unexplored.⁴ His intervention comes against the background of the Scottish bishops’ wider concerns about proposals to decriminalise abortion. It also identifies a problem extending beyond this particular dispute: when the avoidance of offence becomes a governing principle of public discussion, the protection of established opinion can acquire greater importance than the examination of evidence.

That danger is especially apparent here because coerced abortion is not a speculative grievance manufactured by the pro-life movement. On 22 June 2026, Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, presented her report Violence against Mothers to the Human Rights Council. Paragraph 41 expressly recognised that women may be forced or coerced into abortion, including in circumstances involving intimate-partner violence, trafficking, sexual exploitation and the misuse of abortion medication. It further acknowledged that inadequate financial resources and the absence of conditions necessary to raise a child may compel women to terminate pregnancies. Paragraph 98(e) recommended criminalising forced or coerced abortion, including sex-selective and disability-selective abortion, together with screening by trained healthcare professionals to identify coercion before abortion medication is dispensed.⁵

The report should be represented precisely. It records the findings and recommendations of an independent United Nations expert; it is not a binding judgment of the United Nations or a resolution adopted by its member states. Nor does the Special Rapporteur advocate the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. Elsewhere, she recommends that survivors of rape should have access to abortion, a proposal incompatible with Catholic moral teaching. That difference makes her condemnation of coerced abortion particularly relevant to the present controversy. Her concern cannot simply be dismissed as a consequence of accepting the Catholic doctrine of the sanctity of unborn life. She identifies a specific form of violence against women within a human-rights framework that otherwise admits legal abortion.

Scotland’s own examination of abortion legislation provides equally compelling grounds for discussion. The independent Expert Group commissioned by the Scottish Government reported in November 2025 that there is no specific statutory offence in Scots law of coercing a woman into, or out of, an abortion. Its assessment was carefully qualified. Domestic-abuse legislation, offences concerning threatening or abusive behaviour, and common-law provisions relating to assault and threats can already be employed in appropriate circumstances. The absence of a specific offence therefore does not mean that forced abortion is generally lawful or that victims necessarily lack legal remedies. Indeed, the Group considered that existing offences would probably capture the most serious cases in which coercion could be proved. Nevertheless, it also acknowledged that they would not cover every circumstance and that a new offence encompassing reproductive coercion might merit consideration.⁶

This is an important qualification to SPUC’s own presentation. The title No Law to Protect Her is rhetorically powerful but legally broader than the evidence warrants. There are laws which may protect her. The unresolved question is whether those laws protect her adequately, consistently and comprehensively, particularly where psychological or economic coercion falls short of threats or conduct readily prosecuted under existing provisions. The distinction is not pedantic. It concerns the difference between identifying a legislative gap and asserting an absence of legal protection altogether. Effective reform requires accuracy about what the law already does.

The Expert Group also recognised that reproductive coercion includes pressure to become pregnant or remain pregnant, and cited research suggesting that such conduct is more common than coercion intended to end a pregnancy. It therefore advised against treating coerced abortion in isolation from other forms of reproductive abuse. Scottish Women’s Aid expressed concern that creating additional offences could expose victims to further trauma, particularly where proceedings were pursued without their consent. The Group recommended improved clinical guidance and safeguarding training regardless of whether a new offence was introduced.⁶ These are serious objections and constructive proposals which merit consideration. They make the cancellation of an opportunity for discussion more regrettable, not less. The existence of difficult legal and evidential questions should encourage rigorous examination rather than discourage it.

The practical reality of the abuse is illustrated by a case already before Scotland’s courts. In July 2025, Stephen Doohan was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow to ten years and six months’ imprisonment after admitting offences arising from the administration of abortion medication to his pregnant partner without her knowledge or consent. The resulting termination of a wanted pregnancy was accompanied by serious physical and psychological harm. His conviction included the Scottish common-law offence of procuring an abortion.⁷ This case demonstrates that existing criminal provisions can be used effectively. But it also raises a further problem identified by the Expert Group: its recommendation to repeal common-law abortion offences would remove the particular offence employed in Doohan’s prosecution. The Group consequently advised the Scottish Government to consider whether a new offence should address unlawful acts by third parties which intentionally or recklessly cause the loss of a pregnancy without the woman’s consent.⁶

This is perhaps the most substantial legislative question arising from the controversy. Scotland is considering reforms intended to remove abortion from the ordinary framework of criminal law, yet the same review recognises that the removal of certain offences may require replacement safeguards against non-consensual pregnancy termination. The challenge is not necessarily an argument against every conceivable reform. It is an insistence that protections for victims must survive changes to the legal structure. A legislature cannot reasonably claim to have modernised the law if, in doing so, it leaves uncertainty about how some of the gravest abuses will be punished.

The provision of abortion medication through remote consultation introduces another dimension. There is no basis for asserting that every telemedical abortion is coerced, or that the absence of a face-to-face appointment necessarily implies inadequate care. Nevertheless, arrangements in which medication is prescribed and supplied without direct physical examination create safeguarding questions where an abusive partner controls communication, impersonates the patient, intercepts correspondence or supervises her answers. The UN Special Rapporteur’s recommendation for screening, whether in person or online, recognises the need to identify precisely such circumstances.⁵ The appropriate response is to examine the effectiveness of existing safeguards, not to treat concern about coercion as an attack upon every woman seeking an abortion.

There is a pointed contrast with the attention already devoted to protecting access to abortion facilities. Scotland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which came into force in September 2024, creates offences relating to certain forms of influence, harassment and interference within designated areas.⁸ The legislation has already given rise to disputes about the appropriate limits of peaceful expression. In August 2025, Nuntiatoria examined the case of Rose Docherty, the elderly grandmother arrested after standing silently near a Glasgow hospital with a sign offering conversation to women who wished to speak. Prosecutors subsequently decided not to pursue charges.⁹ The point is not that harassment outside clinics should be tolerated, nor that the legal circumstances of clinic access and domestic coercion are identical. Rather, it is that the state has devoted explicit legislative attention to forms of influence which may affect access to abortion, while the question of whether a woman receives equivalent protection when pressured to undergo one remains under consideration.

The deeper difficulty concerns the meaning of freedom itself. Modern abortion politics frequently treats the availability of termination as a principal measure of women’s autonomy. Yet freedom is not demonstrated merely by the presence of an available procedure. A woman who wishes to continue her pregnancy may find that her partner threatens abandonment, her employer withdraws support, her family refuses accommodation, or her financial circumstances appear to make motherhood impossible. Some of these situations may amount to deliberate coercion; others may reflect hardship or social injustice without constituting a criminal offence. It is essential not to confuse the categories. Nevertheless, the distinction between a formally available choice and a genuinely uncoerced decision is fundamental. Where motherhood carries severe social or economic penalties, the language of choice may conceal pressures which public policy has failed to alleviate.

Catholic teaching approaches this question from a more complete moral foundation. The wrongness of abortion does not depend solely upon the absence of consent. The Church teaches that innocent human life is inviolable from conception, and that the unborn child possesses a dignity which neither personal preference nor legislative permission can extinguish. A freely requested abortion is not thereby morally justified. Equally, a woman subjected to coercion suffers an additional injustice: her own dignity and freedom are violated, often by those who possess the greatest duty to protect her. Mother and child are not competing moral interests to be weighed against one another according to convenience. Both are human beings whose welfare imposes obligations upon those around them.

Pope St John Paul II addressed this with unusual directness in Evangelium Vitae. In paragraph 59, he recognised the responsibility of fathers who pressure women into abortion, relatives and friends who impose their demands, and societies which fail to provide the assistance mothers require. He explicitly described circumstances in which a woman may feel psychologically forced into abortion, placing particular moral responsibility upon those who have imposed that pressure. His condemnation extended beyond individual perpetrators to legislators and to failures in public policy which leave families unsupported.¹⁰ The encyclical thus refuses the convenient fiction that abortion is always the isolated decision of a woman exercising unconstrained personal autonomy. It recognises the moral significance of social relationships, economic hardship and the obligations neglected by others.

This teaching also places an unavoidable responsibility upon Catholics. It is not sufficient to insist that unborn children have a right to life while leaving vulnerable mothers to carry the burdens of pregnancy and parenthood without assistance. A woman threatened with eviction, abandonment or financial ruin requires practical help: secure accommodation, medical care, material support, protection from abuse, companionship and the reassurance that she will not be deserted after childbirth. Those who advocate the protection of unborn life must be prepared to support the women carrying that life. Otherwise, the defence of moral principle risks becoming detached from the very human circumstances in which that principle must be lived.

At the same time, compassion must not require the abandonment of moral clarity. The Church’s defence of the unborn child cannot be reduced to an appeal for better consent procedures, as though an abortion becomes morally unobjectionable once external pressure has been excluded. Nor should concern for the mother be presented as somehow secondary to concern for the child. The Catholic understanding is more demanding than either simplification. It recognises the wrong of abortion, the wrong of coercion, the reality of diminished personal culpability under pressure, and the positive duties owed by families, institutions and society to those who find themselves in difficulty. It asks not merely whether a woman has agreed to an abortion, but whether every reasonable effort has been made to protect her and her child.

None of this establishes that the SNP approves of coerced abortion. That would be an unwarranted conclusion, and the party’s critics should resist the temptation to substitute accusations of motive for scrutiny of its decisions. What can fairly be said is that the SNP cancelled a previously approved discussion of a recognised safeguarding issue because of objections to the organisers, while its own expert advisers had identified unresolved questions concerning that issue. The subsequent refusal to reinstate the event, notwithstanding the distinction between permitting debate and endorsing its participants, raises legitimate concerns about the place of conscientious disagreement within the party’s public proceedings.

There is a more constructive course. The Scottish Government could publish a clear response to the Expert Group’s recommendations on reproductive coercion, explain whether existing offences adequately protect women pressured into abortion, and identify how the proposed repeal of common-law provisions would affect prosecution of non-consensual pregnancy termination. It could establish whether clinical safeguarding procedures are sufficiently robust, particularly where medication is supplied remotely, and invite evidence from survivors, healthcare practitioners, domestic-abuse specialists, legal experts and organisations representing differing moral and political positions. Such an examination need not assume that SPUC is correct in all its proposals. It need only recognise that disagreement with SPUC does not remove the Government’s responsibility to consider the evidence.

The broader question is whether contemporary political movements remain capable of distinguishing disagreement from danger. Freedom of expression is of little practical significance if it extends only to those whose convictions are already approved. Equally, responsible public debate requires accuracy, civility and an honest account of competing concerns. SPUC must be prepared to defend its legal proposals against criticism. Those who favour liberal abortion legislation must be prepared to explain how their preferred arrangements protect women who do not wish to abort. Neither side should be exempt from scrutiny. And women who have suffered reproductive coercion must never become incidental to a dispute over the ideological credentials of those who speak on their behalf.

The cancellation of a conference fringe event will not, by itself, determine the future of abortion legislation in Scotland. It does, however, illuminate an important tension between the rhetoric of individual autonomy and the political willingness to examine situations in which that autonomy is compromised. The UN Special Rapporteur has acknowledged the problem. Scotland’s own advisers have examined it. The criminal courts have encountered an especially grave manifestation of it. There is more than sufficient evidence to justify serious public discussion.

Bishop Keenan’s intervention therefore concerns something more important than the fortunes of one campaign organisation. It concerns the conditions under which moral disagreement can be heard, evidence can be tested, and vulnerable people can receive protection without first satisfying an ideological test. A political conference may close its doors to a particular speaker. It cannot, by doing so, dispose of the questions that speaker intended to raise.

The final measure of any society’s concern for women is not the frequency with which it invokes their freedom, but the seriousness with which it protects them from those who would take that freedom away. For Catholics, that protection rests upon an even deeper obligation: to defend the dignity of the mother without forgetting the life of the child, and to defend the child without abandoning the mother.

The debate the SNP cancelled concerns women who may have been denied the freedom to continue pregnancies they wished to continue. Excluding their advocates does nothing to answer their plight. Their protection deserves more than political discomfort; it deserves justice.