“There's so many stories in the world so pick one & go for it.”

Investigative journalist Sian Norris on her book, Bodies Under Siege

Abortion rights are under attack - but the question we should be asking is: what can we, and what should we, do about it?

Just before my holiday earlier this year I picked up Bodies Under Siege by Sian Norris, a feminist writer and investigative journalist. (She’s also on Substack -

Sian Norris

) It was at a time I had been subjected to degrading healthcare experiences - and there was a want to know and understand more. Her book puts heed to a number if misconceptions, while also sketching out the networks, and how organised they are, which aim to curtail abortion and then women’s rights.

We caught up over a Zoom call. This interview was made possible thanks to Journo Resources new transcription software service. And you should most definetely buy the book.

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You have reported extensively on abortion rights and kind of the curtailing of those rights worldwide. I'm curious as to know, what was the need for a book in compiling your wider work?

No one's ever asked me that question before..! (Laughs)

I think so, so yeah, I spent a long time as a journalist investigating the threats to abortion rights, particularly in the global North, but with some focus on the global South and particularly in East Africa. I think what was, I mean, part of it is that I wanted to write a book..! And I think what I was finding was, you know, I was doing lots of work in publishing these articles and it was a bit, here's an article here about Romania, here’s an article here about Poland, here's an article here about Slovakia, here's an article about CitizenGo in Kenya. And what it really needed was a much bigger space to fully explain and expose how these networks were interlinked and how they were working. And the sort of thesis that I was really interested in trying to look at through the book was this notion of that being a pipeline from extremism to the mainstream.

And so what I wanted to do was show that extremist ideas about abortion and women's bodies and how these ideas around anti-abortion movement or how anti-abortion movements linked to fascist ideology starts in these extreme spaces and become kind of laundered through more respectful anti-abortion Christian nationalist organisations who then have the ears of politicians and decision makers, who then put these extremist ideas into policy that has an impact on women's and girls' lives.