BPAS ran the national campaign for safe access zones across England and Wales since 2014. In 2020, we joined forces with student-founded campaigning group Back Off Scotland to deliver these vital protections to Scotland.
Across Scotland, over 15 hospitals and clinics were experiencing regular anti-abortion protests and 75% of reproductive age women lived in a health board area that was targeted.
Together with Back Off Scotland, we collected hundreds of testimonies of women who had been harassed and intimidated at the gates of clinics and called on the Scottish Government to do the right thing to protect patients and staff accessing vital reproductive healthcare from this behaviour.
In June 2024, a Member’s Bill proposed by Gillian Mackay MSP, to establish safe access zones around all medical facilities providing abortion care passed with overwhelming support, with Members of the Scottish Parliament voting it through 118-1.
In Scotland, the legal time limit for abortion care is 24-weeks but there is no health board that provides care beyond 20-weeks. This means that approximately 70 women per year have to travel down to a BPAS clinic in England for care they are entitled to – and should be able to – receive in Scotland.
The women forced to make the journey to England for care are some of the most vulnerable: girls under the age of 16, rape victims, those with severe learning disabilities, and those who have never left Scotland before. The number of women and girls making this journey is on the rise and is currently at the highest number we have seen since before the pandemic.
BPAS has worked alongside campaigning group Back Off Scotland on holding the Scottish Government to account for a number of years. In June 2022, we received a commitment from the government that work would be done to provide abortion within Scotland up to the legal limit. As of the beginning of 2025, this promise has not been fulfilled, and hundreds of women have had to make the journey south.
Whilst BPAS will always be here to provide care to those women that Scotland does not, we are calling on the government to bring forward as a matter of urgency proposals for a centrally-commissioned service for the provision of abortion care up to the legal limit in Scotland – ensuring no more women are forced to travel for care. This must include the ability for women to access surgical abortion care, and to receive medical terminations within their own Health Board area.
BPAS leads on work to reform abortion law in England and Wales (see our #TimeToAct campaign here) and have recently joined the Scottish Government’s Expert Working Group on abortion law reform alongside organisations like the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology and the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare to advocate for a modernisation of Scotland’s abortion law.
Over the coming months, the Expert Working Group will be tasked with developing proposals for a new, updated abortion act with the aim of it being introduced in the next Scottish parliamentary term.
