UK foreign aid funds Mexican group illegally posting abortion pills across US border, says SPUC
The UK’s foreign aid budget has been used for the last five years to fund Las Libres, a pro-abortion Mexican group that has illegally posted abortion pills across the United States border, claims UK Catholic pro-life charity Society for the Protectiomn of Unborn Children (SPUC).
According to SPUC, Las Libres was established to provide abortion services in Mexico. However, after the US Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022, the group began to illegally send abortion pills across the border into the US.
“US activists reportedly deliver the pills on request via an underground network of messaging apps and emails in breach of the law in pro-life US states like Texas,” said SPUC in a Feb. 03 press release.
“The Safe Abortion Action Fund (SAAF), which funds Las Libres, has received £5 million from the UK since 2019, though Veronica Sanchez, the founder of Las Libres, claims that the money did not pay for the illegal postal scheme.
“While a UK Foreign Office spokesperson also said that British taxpayer money had funded the group’s illegal activities in the US, funds had contributed to abortion provision for migrant women in Mexico.”
Responding to news that UK money was funding a pro-abortion group conducting illegal activities in the US, Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, told The Telegraph: “Taxpayers will rightly be concerned by what their money has been funding or is connected to…
“The priority of the [Labour] Government should be to protect our national security, which is exactly why Kemi Badenoch called for overseas aid to be redeployed to boost defence spending – something the Prime Minister clearly listened to.”
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is currently in Washington to discuss security and other matters with President Donald Trump. Before the visit, the Prime Minister announced that the UK would boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP while cutting the aid budget by £6 billion.
SPUC has criticised the UK’s aid budget for being used to directly or indirectly promote and/or provide abortion overseas, including money sent to China where abortion has been used against the Uyghur minority population.
At a Westminster event for MPs in 2023, SPUC called on the UK Government to cease all aid to China’s “brutal” regime.
Between 2016 and 2020, the UK Government also gave £256 million to Marie Stopes International (MSI) and £96 million to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), both well-known abortion providers.
Following the disclosure in 2022, the Government said it could not say how much of the total £352 million was spent on abortion.
In 2021, IPPF threatened to sue the UK Government after MPs voted to cut its foreign aid budget, including funding of abortion, from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income.
A 2017 Savanta ComRes poll found that 65% of British people objected to public money being used to fund abortion overseas.
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SPUC is the world’s first and UK’s largest pro-life campaigning and educational organisation in the world