How the group behind the Supreme Court abortion drug case is expanding its fight globally

London – British anti-abortion activist Isabel Vaughn-Spruce says she was not protesting when she stood silently in a sheltered area outside an abortion clinic near her church in Birmingham, England.

“I reasoned internally that surely my silent thoughts should still be able to happen within that zone. My prayers. So I went and prayed silently outside the abortion center, initially when it was closed, and I was arrested for it, twice,” Vaughn-Spruce told CBS News.

UK law establishes protected zones around abortion clinics. They are intended to protect women seeking care from protesters. The boundaries of the zone are marked by signs around facilities providing abortion services.

Vaughn-Spruce said that after her arrest, she reached out to a legal group with American roots — Alliance Defending Freedom International — for help. In the end, she was not convicted of any crime.

“Defending these issues and freedoms, whether in America or any other country, is essentially still the same. So the roots of an organization, in some ways, whether it’s American or English, doesn’t really make any difference to me,” said Vaughn-Spruce. “The work that [ADF] we’re doing was absolutely tremendous.”

What is the Alliance in Defense of Freedom?

ADF International UK is a registered charity in Britain that is supported by donations from ADF in the United States, according to its financial disclosures.

ADF, launched in 1994 and boasting a network of more than 4,500 lawyers, describes itself as “one of the leading Christian law firms committed to protecting religious freedom, freedom of expression, marriage and family, of parents and the sanctity of life.”

Provides legal support to people whose cases align with their causes.

ADF lawyers argued on behalf of plaintiffs seeking a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that would have restricted access to the widely used abortion pill, mifepristone, across the country, but the court rejected their argument in a ruling decision handed down Thursday, defending access to medicine. The group also supported the Mississippi case, which eventually went to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v..

The ADF claims it played a role in at least 74 Supreme Court victories in total and represented 15 parties that won victories on the United States’ highest court.

The ADF’s fast-growing international operations

“I think Americans know very, very little about what these American organizations are exporting in terms of disenfranchisement policies to other countries,” Heidi Beirich, founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told CBS News . “What is happening is that a very powerful far-right movement is emerging, built with the aim of targeting specific communities, and which is affecting the human rights of people around the world.”

Beirich previously worked as an extremism expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which listed the ADF as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group in 2016.

The SPLC says it made this designation because the ADF “supports the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that [it] It’s okay to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for having consensual sex. He also supported laws requiring the forced sterilization of European transsexuals.”

A representative from ADF International UK told CBS News that the group rejects the characterization of it as a hate group.

ADF International has established offices in European power centers including Geneva, Brussels, Strasbourg and London.

“This brings litigation at the European Court of Human Rights. They operate in Latin America,” said Beirich. “I’m telling you that millions of dollars are being invested in their efforts, not just to shift the United States toward their Christian nationalist vision, but now other countries as well, including the United Kingdom and the EU.”

According to its financial records from 2022 to 2023, ADF International’s UK branch saw its income increase in that one-year period by 514,729 pounds sterling (about $655,036) to 1,068,552 ($1,360,079). . Its expenses also increased by £220,751 ($280,982) over the same period, to £993,118 ($1,264,090).

According to the group’s financial disclosures, this money was used to provide legal analysis and reports to various Members of the UK Parliament, participate in public comment, and “help those who may be prevented from living and worshiping in accordance with the principles and Christian ethics, whether through, for example, engagement at local level or with key decision-makers.”

The ADF has ties to some of the most prominent conservative names on the American political scene.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is a former attorney for the group. While working for the ADF, Johnson unsuccessfully lobbied for a ballot measure in Louisiana in 2004 that would have banned same-sex marriage, according to the Associated Press. On a 2003 opinion piece For a local Louisiana newspaper, Johnson wrote that homosexuality was an “abnormal lifestyle” and “dangerous sexual conduct.” In the byline of the article, Johnson is identified as a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, the former name of Alliance Defending Freedom.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett also gave at least five paid speeches between 2011 and 2015 for the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a program for young conservative lawyers that is managed and funded by the ADF.

During her confirmation hearing in 2020 Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barrett was questioned about her ties to the group. When asked when she knew that the Blackstone Legal Fellowship was run by the ADF, Barrett responded, “As I recall, I learned that the ADF funded the Blackstone program when I received the honorarium for my presentation, or perhaps when I saw the signature line in an e-mail.”

Barrett told the committee that she had “no specific knowledge” of the ADF’s decades-long efforts against LGBTQ+ rights, including opposition to same-sex marriage.

ADF global operations

ADF International originally agreed to provide a spokesperson for an interview with CBS News, but canceled twice at the last minute and backed out entirely. When CBS News sent questions to the group, it responded with a four-paragraph statement that said: “Despite the unsubstantiated claims of those who disagree with our values, there is nothing unusual about the money we receive – we comply with all rules set by charity regulators. .”

“Our UK office is made up of local team members who work to defend human rights in Britain – including, but not limited to, freedom of expression and freedom of religion,” the statement said. “As a global organisation, we receive funding from many different countries, as do many UK charities on both sides of the abortion debate.”

Beirich said Americans should be aware of the ADF’s activities abroad because of the group’s effectiveness in helping change laws in U.S. courts.

“This is an organization that wins and uses the courts to implement its policies,” she told CBS News. “We should really pay attention to them, because they have already fundamentally changed American society with these decisions, and the same could happen elsewhere.”