Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I offer Green group support for the proposition from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. I almost feel that I do not need to, given that the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, very powerfully made the argument that the Bill unnecessarily exceptionalises abortion when there are very comparable procedures conducted in similar procedural ways—hip replacements and cataract operations. Yes, we need to improve the collection of statistics, but we do not have a Bill before us to do that. By definition, the exceptionalising that is going on is very obvious. I want to pick up on two comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, and most respectfully to disagree with him. The noble Lord said that what is happening in the US is not relevant here. I spoke at Second Reading about the influence and money flowing from the United States of America into the UK. I can update your Lordships’ House on that. I was going back as far 2014, and a chapter of a book I wrote addressing these issues. This has been highlighted by Peter Geoghegan, who wrote Democracy for Sale, and others. The so-called Alliance Defending Freedom from the US provides massive funding. In 2020, it put £324,000 into a similarly named organisation in the UK. By 2024, that had risen to £1.1 million of the organisation’s total income of £1.3 million. We are debating this Bill in the context of that flood of US money seeking to influence what is happening in the UK. I put Written Question HL6542 to the Government about this. I am afraid that the Government are not taking this with the seriousness that it deserves for defending our democracy. The Answer referred to lobbying of the Government and what measures the Government have in place. We need to think about the measures that we need across our society to deal with the inequality of financial arms that is occurring in these debates because of the money flooding in from certain forces within the US. The noble Lord, Lord Weir, also said that the context did not really matter. However, this Bill appears before us in the context of more than 60 MPs in the other place backing one amendment—there is another one too—to decriminalise abortion, to end the exceptionalisation of abortion right across our law. That would make this Bill look particularly strange and ill-fitting. For those reasons, I support the proposition from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.