The US has designated abortions on the NHS as a human rights violation. Photo / Getty Images
The US has designated abortions done on Britain’s National Health Service as a human rights violation.
As part of its annual report on human rights practices in foreign countries, the US state department said state-sponsored abortions would now be considered a human rights breach.
Sex change treatments for minors, arrests for hate speech, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hiring policies, and the facilitation of mass migration will also be seen as human rights infringements.
The move is designed to combat what the Trump administration claimed were “destructive ideologies” it said were promoted by the Biden administration and had “been used to propagate human rights violations”.
“President Trump will not allow the mutilation of children, attacks on free speech, and racially discriminatory practices, to go unchecked,” the department wrote on X.
Women in England and Wales had more than 250,000 abortions in 2022, the latest year for which figures are available – the highest number on record, according to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHS). Of these, 99% were funded by the NHS, with 80% carried out by independent sector providers.
The report is congressionally mandated and covers all countries receiving US assistance and all United Nations member states.
It has long served as a reference point for politicians, academics, and researchers investigating human rights conditions or asylum claims in specific countries.
The UK and other member states will now be asked to count the number of abortions taking place in their countries, and face being denounced in the official report for funding abortions or distributing drugs that end a pregnancy.
While countries are not required to provide information, refusal to co-operate is often explicitly mentioned in the report, which informs US policy on security assistance, sanctions and trade.
For countries that receive money through USAID, the report could have real-world consequences.
“In recent years, new destructive ideologies have given safe harbour to human rights violations,” Tommy Pigott, a state department spokesman, told The Daily Signal.
“The Trump administration will not allow these human rights violations, such as the mutilation of children, laws that infringe on free speech, and racially discriminatory employment practices, to go unchecked. We are saying enough is enough.”
US officials will also be required to track coercive euthanasia, violations of religious freedom such as anti-Semitism, and medical abuses, including forced organ harvesting, forced testing and eugenic gene editing of human embryos.
Recently the Trump administration has stepped up its scrutiny of UK domestic policy on human rights issues, including immigration.
A State Department official urged Sir Keir Starmer’s Government to “come to the table” and get serious about tackling mass migration, labelling it an “existential threat to Western civilisation”.
In November, the UK’s Daily Telegraph revealed that the Trump administration was considering extending refugee status to free speech activists who had been prosecuted for their words or for taking part in silent protests outside abortion clinics.
The State Department’s 2024 report, released this August, found “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression” in Britain. It warned that the situation had “worsened” over the course of the year, frequently referring to the period after Sir Keir Starmer was elected last July.
The report said that, while media observers deemed these to be “especially grievous” examples of government censorship, “censorship of ordinary Britons was increasingly routine, often targeted at political speech”.
It cited the example of Adam Smith-Connor, an Army veteran who was given a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay £9000 ($21,117) in October 2024 for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic in Dorset for his unborn son.
While focusing on freedom of speech, 2024’s pared-back report omitted discussion of dire human rights conditions in some countries that have agreed to accept migrants deported from the US as part of the president’s immigration crackdown.
In addition to eliminating entire sections for certain countries – including discrimination against LGBTQ+ people – it left out previous criticism of widespread human rights abuses in El Salvador, China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.
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