Content note: This is fiction. It contains abortion and pregnancy loss.
Just a couple of reading notes before you start. This blog is part two of a serialisation in four parts. If you haven’t yet read part one, I’d encourage you to go back and take a look: Within Living Memory, part one (2021): How Afghan Women Lost Everything in Three Years. Part one was all true, and covered the rapid change and horrific treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan up until the present day. Moving forwards, parts two, three and four are fiction. There is a caveat, which is that every single thing that happens to Hannah in this story has actually happened in real life, to real women, in real countries around the world. Where this has happened I’ve put the country and the year in brackets within the text, so that if you’d like to read more about it or check the facts, you can. The only thing I’ve made up in the following three parts is the order and the dates. I do hope you gain something from reading this, and if there is just one action I would urge you to take that would make a real difference, it would be to go out and vote at the next election.
June 2029
Hannah walks briskly into the office at 7.20 on a Tuesday morning. She’s the first one there, and it’s still so early that the lights tick on one bank at a time as she walks across the floor and passes the motion sensors. The humming of the fridge reminds her to pop into the kitchen and look for the water bottle she thinks she left at work yesterday.
She’s come in early, like she does at the end of every month, to do her expenses. It’s the only job she needs the peace and quiet for. She sips on her overpriced skinny latte while tapping away at the keyboard. Amongst other things, this month she’s claiming for train tickets to Birmingham for a client visit, a sandwich she grabbed while rushing to catch the train back, and a taxi she probably shouldn’t have taken.
Once she’s logged in she notices the expenses system seems to have been updated. Everything looks the same, except there are now two new boxes at the bottom: marital status, and number of dependants. Initially she scrolls straight past them and hits submit, but an error comes back, and that’s when she sees the little red stars next to them.
She clicks in the first box and types single, and in the second she types none, and presses submit. This time it goes through, but she can’t shake the thought of those red stars. She isn’t really bothered about the questions. She thinks it’s odd that she was forced to answer them before it would let her submit.
Hannah decides it must be the new HR system. They’d mentioned they were doing an update over the weekend, and it’s probably just a data thing. It’ll be the audit. She drowns the last of her lukewarm coffee, separates the cup and the lid and pops them in the recycling, and heads to the kitchen to make another. She’s greeted with the overwhelming sweet aroma of leftover curry, which she can see is still sitting on the side, cementing itself to the bowl it’s been left in. By the time the kettle’s hissing has subsided she’s thinking about the Birmingham client and the reports she needs to prepare that morning. Walking back to her desk she sees Priya coming in with a huge smile on her face. She’s a ray of sunshine and positivity that makes the office a better place.
May 2028
Thirteen months earlier, Hannah had left home a few minutes earlier than normal and popped into her local polling station to vote. It was a normal Thursday morning on her regular commute. She always voted. Initially it was because her mum had made them, but she’d come to realise it was the right thing to do, and it only took five minutes.
The polling station had always been in the village hall. It was an old building, but well kept and mostly clean, apart from the cobwebs that were too high to reach. It had an original parquet floor, and some black and white pictures on the walls of committees that had met there decades ago. The air had a hint of fabric chairs that had been stacked near a damp wall for too long, and the burning dust from the sporadically used old heater.
It wasn’t a difficult choice this time round. She wasn’t going to vote for Rebuild, and although she didn’t have any great love or loyalty to any of the other lot, she put a cross in a box and headed off to the station.
She’d meant to stay up that night to catch the results, but she ended up going to bed after the exit poll at ten. She’d already had two glasses of wine, and she had a nine o’clock meeting the following morning that she was dreading, so she thought it best to turn in. The exit poll had already told her everything she needed to know: the big number repeated across every channel, the newsreaders’ faces and the colourful graphics.
“So that’s that then,” she said to herself. Virtually the whole nation had seen it coming. The old party had fallen apart and been useless for years and years, and everyone knew it. It was pretty inevitable. Five more years of the same thing under a different name. She turned the telly off and went to bed, grabbing a glass of water to ward off the wine. She heard the boiler click off as she climbed under the covers. She’d bought this house herself three years ago and still couldn’t quite believe that it was all hers. She was proud of that, although sometimes she had to restart the boiler a few times to get the radiators hot enough.
The following morning she checked her phone. Her mum had texted at half eleven with just one word: Rebuild. She’d known it was headed that way, but she still opened her news app for the details. Rebuild had won a proper majority. Turnout was normal for a Thursday in May, and she didn’t think much more of it. Hannah really missed having her mum nearby. Since she and Dad had split, her mum had found a gorgeous flat overlooking the river about an hour away and had thrived. She had new hobbies, a new job and was happily doing whatever she wanted. They spoke a lot on the phone, but it wasn’t quite the same as having her five minutes round the corner. She put the kettle on and headed for the bathroom to get ready.
By seven thirty that Friday morning, Hannah was in her usual spot on the platform at Hitchin station. It was still cold enough for a coat in the early morning, even though spring was heading into summer. Everyone stood in the same place they stood every day. Nobody talked to each other; they barely looked at each other. There was the woman with the green fold-up bike who always waited near the top end of the platform, and the man who was permanently glued to a horror novel. Same as always. Even the train seemed to be running on time. The rails began to make that eerie echoing for a good minute before it rounded the corner to approach the station.
She noticed one thing that was different that morning. A man, a little further down the platform, scrolled his phone with a small satisfied look on his face. As she was trying to work out what the expression was, the train pulled in, the doors bleeped and swished open, and the shuffling of feet began.
Somewhere between Stevenage and Welwyn, Hannah was standing on the train, pinned between horror novel man and fancy perfume woman. She always wore too much, something sweet and expensive that got caught in the back of her throat as the carriage filled up. She held the overhead bar with one hand and scrolled the news app with the other. Every outlet had the election covered. The train jerked and she felt someone’s rucksack press into her back.
She shifted slightly to get away from the rucksack. She thought of the last lot in power, and the one before that, and Boris, all of them. We’ve been here before. But it had always been all right in the end, because we didn’t live in a dictatorship. We weren’t China or Russia. We had courts, due process, appeal courts, Parliament and the law. They couldn’t just walk in and do what they liked, whatever people said.
Before she got off at King’s Cross she’d decided she’d be a bit more involved this time. She selected UK politics to follow on her news app and thought about encouraging her friends to vote next time, like her mum had with her. She was relieved to get off the sardine tin of a train and followed the silent commuter crowd down to the tube, passing the big screens showing election coverage on repeat. Only a couple of stops to Liverpool Street and she’d be in the office by half eight. She was looking forward to lunch with Priya. They’d talked about trying the new sushi place this week. Leanne from her team had been the week before and said it was well worth the visit.
In that first week there was a lot of news coverage of Rebuild, and most of it about the scrapping of the Equality Act. It was everywhere, the radio, the papers, the news apps, you couldn’t get away from it. They’d promised to repeal the Act in the first week, and they did. It was going to be replaced, they said, with a Workplace Fairness Act, which covered jobs and nothing else. By Friday it had blown over, back to business as usual. (Reform UK, February 2026, pledged on the record.) [1]
The firm sent an email out to all staff that week, stating its position. The subject line was “Our commitment to a fair workplace”. The email said nothing would change at work, the company’s values remained the same, and there was a link to a new Workplace Fairness policy. HR put on a lunchtime briefing about it, and nine people went.
Hannah didn’t go, because she had a claims review at half twelve that she’d already moved twice. She didn’t open the link either.
Tom, a tall chap in his early thirties, was new to the company. She bumped into him waiting for the lift. He was easy to talk to, a decent man, the type that holds the lift for you. No one was running for the lift that day though; it seemed to be taking its time, and the LED display had it stuck on the ninth floor. Whilst they waited he mentioned the election, and said, “To be fair, some of it had got a bit silly, hadn’t it?” And she half agreed, because she had all those forms in the back of her mind that they used to have to fill in before a training day.
She’d remember later that she had half agreed.
The following weekend Hannah was having lunch at her dad’s. When she walked in, her dad, Mike, was swearing under his breath trying to get the telly reconnected to the wifi, and Dan, her older brother, was rather unsuccessfully trying to guide him to the right menu. She greeted them and headed straight for the hubbub in the kitchen. There was a chicken roasting in the oven. It must have been in there a while, as the kitchen had a delicious aroma of thyme and the windows had steamed up slightly. Hannah’s stomach rumbled.
Baby Alfie was in the high chair, crushing breadsticks into the tray and screaming with delight as he swished the crumbs all over the floor. Kelly, Dan’s wife, was peeling potatoes at the sink and singing wildly along to the radio, trying to entertain Alfie, who was more interested in making a mess of the floor.
Dan gave up helping with the telly, sometimes it was like talking to a brick wall and clearly Mike thought he knew best. He wandered into the chaos of the kitchen and brought up the election. Dan wasn’t particularly political, he never had been. He didn’t bother reading the news and he got his opinions mostly from his mates. He said, “Well, at least they’re doing something, they’ve got to be better than the last lot, they were useless, they all are.” It was probably the most Hannah had ever heard Dan say about politics. Mike had finally sorted the telly and joined them in the kitchen. He didn’t make any comment.
Hannah thought about saying something, but changed her mind. She was the youngest, and had always been the one who got talked over, or whose opinion didn’t seem to count as much as the others’ around the dinner table. She’d ended up being the one who let things go, for the sake of the roast dinner and the baby. She quietly mulled over her opinion in her head and instead said, “Could you pass the potatoes please, Dad?”
September 2028
In September the courts decided that abortion pills sent by post should never have been allowed under the 1967 Act. The wording of the Act said that the treatment has to happen in an approved place, and that sitting at your own kitchen table isn’t one. Nothing had actually been banned. The law remained exactly as it had always been; the courts had just changed the way it was interpreted. It was announced that it would come into effect in four weeks’ time. [2]
Hannah was on the tube when she read about it. The carriage was busier than usual that day, rattling loudly, and she felt each bump through to her bones. The air was thick and hot and she really wished they’d hurry up and replace these uncomfortable old trains. There was a man a few seats along on the opposite side of the carriage who kept leering at her, so she’d engrossed herself in her phone and was trying to ignore him. It seemed odd to her that it was reported as a procurement story, and she’d scrolled for about a minute before she even saw it. (Poland, 2020: the court kept the law and removed one ground, which stopped 97% of all legal abortions.) [3]
She didn’t think much of it, because it didn’t affect her. She wasn’t pregnant and she wasn’t planning on having a baby. It passed through her mind as more of a technicality, and that if anyone needed an abortion they’d still be able to go to the GP or a sexual health clinic. She didn’t put her phone away after she’d finished the article, because the man over the way was still staring at her. She opened a crossword and played until the doors opened at Liverpool Street, and left by the door furthest from him.
October 2028
Hannah had got on with Priya from the moment she walked through the office door on the day of her interview. She’d flown through the questions and come across as personable, intelligent and kind. They’d got on like a house on fire ever since, and not only did they spend most Friday lunchtimes together, they often met up outside work too. They had a habit of finding quiet sanctuaries amongst the busyness of the city, and one of their favourite spots was a little Italian café on Artillery Lane, a few minutes from the office. They served real coffee in this one, not the machine rubbish you got on the high street, and the whole place smelled of the pastries they’d baked that morning. Hannah mostly stuck to a skinny latte, but Priya tended to go for the seasonal special, and at this time of year it nearly always involved some kind of pumpkin spice.
This Friday was a bit different though. Priya had looked slightly uneasy all morning, which was unlike her. They sat down with their drinks and straight away she told Hannah she was pregnant. She said it quickly, with an embarrassed laugh. She’d taken a test on Wednesday and guessed she must be about five weeks gone. It wasn’t planned and she wasn't even sure how it’d happened, as they always used contraception. It was Sam’s, and he was fine about it. In fact he’d been more than fine, and told her he’d support her whatever she decided. They’d only been seeing each other for a few months and weren’t in any position to raise a baby, financially or emotionally, and their relationship hadn’t even made it to living together yet. So they weren’t keeping it, and she’d already arranged the pills.
She explained that she’d started it on her phone. She’d downloaded the app and, in less time than it took Hannah to get the drinks in, filled in the online form and booked her phone consultation for Monday morning. After that the pills would go in the post, and she’d have them by Tuesday or Wednesday. Priya was relieved to have it sorted and didn’t want any fuss. Hannah, of course, said all the right things and respected her wish not to make a big thing of it. They went on to talk about work, a big project coming up at the end of the year, and what on earth the new special in the canteen was that week. Neither of them had worked it out, but they knew it wasn’t good.
Hannah didn’t even think about the story she’d read on the tube the month before, the one that had been filed as a procurement article. They finished their coffees and nipped into the newsagent on the way back to grab some chocolate.
On Monday, Priya was in the office unusually early, loitering around Hannah’s desk waiting for her to arrive, looking pale and worried. As soon as Hannah clapped eyes on her she knew that whatever it was, it was serious. Priya motioned towards an empty meeting room and closed the door behind them. The office wasn’t that busy yet, but as the door closed it cut off the sound of morning greetings and keyboards clacking, and the only thing left was the air con and Priya nervously fiddling with her rings. Her consultation had been cancelled. She’d had an email at seven that morning explaining that the new court ruling took effect from today and they could no longer send abortion pills through the post. She’d need to find a local clinic and be treated in person.
Priya had already rung the local clinic to get herself booked in, and was alarmed to find it had closed. The recorded message said the service was no longer commissioned in the area, and gave a number for the nearest alternative.
She’d rung that number and found that the closest clinic with any appointments was 150 miles away, with the first available date in five weeks’ time. But by then she’d be past ten weeks, meaning she wouldn’t be able to take the pills any more. She’d have to have a clinical procedure, which meant a different appointment with a different wait. Priya spoke frantically, pouring it all out to Hannah in one giant breath and never stopped twiddling the rings on her fingers. (Argentina, 2024: abortion legal, never repealed; the government stopped sending pills out to provinces, by the end of the year half were short, and women paid privately or went without.) [4] (Italy, 2023: legal since 1978, nearly six in ten gynaecologists have registered as conscientious objectors.) [5]
Between them, in the time around meetings, they spent the morning ringing clinics, and eventually found a private one in London that could see her that Thursday and give her the same pills she’d booked for nothing three days earlier. It cost Priya nearly seven hundred pounds, which she had to put on her credit card. [6] She didn’t have the capacity to worry about exactly how she was going to pay it off. Priya also confided to Hannah that morning that she didn’t want to tell her mum, she just wanted it sorted. So she took Thursday and Friday off work and called in sick. Hannah signed it off immediately and told the team Priya had the flu.
Hannah got home that night and poured herself a glass of wine. She sat down on the sofa and didn’t put the TV on, she just sat there listening to the clock tick from the hallway. She felt angry about everything that had happened that day with Priya, but she didn’t really know who she was angry at. She opened her social media and started to type out a post about it. She got halfway through, paused for a moment, and then deleted it. Nobody had banned anything.
That Wednesday, after Priya had left the office, Hannah decided to look into things. She worked with numbers all day and was used to digging into things that didn’t add up. She wanted to know if it was just Priya this had happened to, whether it was just the clinics in their area, or just bad luck.
The first place she looked was the government statistics page for abortions. The last published report in England and Wales that she could find was two years old, with a line at the top saying the publication had been paused pending a review of data quality. That’s odd, she thought. [7]
Then she tried to find out how many clinics had closed, and there was nothing. She tried the regulator’s list of providers, but that page had moved and the new page didn’t have it. She spent forty minutes trying to find a list and eventually gave up altogether. (Argentina, 2024: the health ministry stopped publishing abortion figures; you now need a legal request to get them.) [8] (Italy: the legally required annual report was published two years late in 2026, and covers 2023.) [9]
She’d had the feeling that something was odd about the whole situation, but decided it was probably just a government website update, or the way the whole system took an eternity to publish anything. She closed the laptop and went to get her coat.
March 2029
Dóra was a senior underwriter on another team on the same floor as Hannah. She was in her mid-forties and Hungarian, but had lived here for twenty years. She’d done all her Brexit paperwork years ago. It’d been a nightmare at the time, but she’d filled in every form and everything had been approved. She had a dry sense of humour, was exceptionally good at her job, and always brought the best homemade cake in on her birthday for everyone to share. Hannah had always liked her, but didn’t know her that well.
The canteen was in the basement of the building and served a selection of hot and cold food. It was a loud blend of cutlery, chair legs, chatter and laughter down there, and on Thursdays it was always fish. The television on the wall played 24-hour news on mute. Hannah ate there most days, apart from Fridays when she went out with Priya. Along the ticker at the bottom of the screen, the news read that the government had announced the new Chair and Board of the BBC, and that under the new rules it was the government that now appointed them, rather than an independent panel.
Dóra’s glance paused when she saw the screen. With her mouth still half full, she said to no one in particular, “This is how it all began at home. They didn’t take away our news. They just put their own people on the board.”
Hannah looked at Dóra quizzically, shot a glance at the TV and replied, “Yes, but this is the BBC.” Dóra quietly replied that it had been their BBC too. (Hungary, 2018: newspapers, radio stations and websites handed to one foundation, 476 of them in one go; by 2021 the main opposition radio station had lost its licence over two late forms.) [10] (Argentina, 2024: the national news agency shut in the president’s first speech to Congress and reopened as the state advertising office.) [11]
Walking back to her desk after lunch, Hannah thought about the conversation and really did think Dóra was a bit intense about it all. Later, much later, Hannah would remember Dóra’s words exactly.
April 2029
At some point over the winter, her brother Dan had started sending Hannah short videos. Not nasty ones. The sort where men talk to the camera about the country, about how ‘soft’ things had gone, about how men should be ‘men’. Some were about women in the workplace, others about women in general. Every time they came with a message like “This is quite interesting actually”. After watching about half of the first one she didn’t bother opening the rest, but they kept coming.
It was the start of April, and everyone was gathered at Mike’s for Sunday lunch, as they always were on Easter weekend. Alfie was walking now, and anything small within his reach had been moved to a higher shelf. He was toddling around the lounge dragging a large plastic dinosaur behind him by the tail. It was lamb in the oven this time, a treat these days, the kitchen smelt delicious and the windows were steamed up as usual. Dan started talking about a woman at his work who’d recently had some time off.
He said she’d been off for two weeks in March, and apparently it had been the flu. The lads had to cover her accounts while she was off, and one of them had missed a family christening because of it. He said it turned out she’d had some kind of procedure, well, that’s what he’d heard on the grapevine, but nobody had officially told him. He said it was fine for people to make their own choices, but if they were going to do that sort of thing they needed to sort their own lives out and stop dumping it on the rest of the team.
Hannah couldn’t bite her tongue any longer. She said to Dan, with a fierce look behind her eyes, that he had “no idea what that woman has been through, and it’s a heck of a lot easier to talk about choices when you’ve never been the one who had to make them.” She stopped, and went back to putting potatoes on her plate as an awkward silence filled the room.
Dan didn’t argue back. In fact he didn’t engage at all. He just said she’d got very political lately, mimicking her. Kelly laughed, and her dad rolled his eyes the way he always did, once, up at the ceiling. (Canada, 2026: a parliamentary report found nearly four in ten young English-speaking men agree that equality has been achieved and feminism has no reason to exist, and that a new social media account identified as male is served antifeminist content within a day.) [12]
For the rest of lunch she was talked over, and every time she tried to give an opinion it was dismissed without any further discussion. She drove home frustrated by the way her family treated her. It seemed to be getting worse, and coming more from Dan than ever before.
May 2029
Over the spring Hannah noticed that Tom was around more than usual. He often stopped by her desk for a chat, held the lift for her, and always remembered the conversations they’d had and followed up to ask how she was. He never sent her any videos like Dan did.
She told Tom a bit about Dan and the videos he’d started sharing. Every time, Tom’s response was to gently steer the conversation onto something different. Hannah didn’t want to get political with Tom. She liked him, and easy conversation was exactly what she wanted right now.
Without mentioning Priya, she’d told Tom once about a friend who’d had a nightmare getting an appointment. He said the NHS was a shambles, everyone knew that, and moved on to something else, and Hannah was relieved that he thought so too.
Towards the end of the spring Tom asked her out. There were no grand gestures, and she liked that about him. They met at the tube station and went to a chain Italian restaurant near Covent Garden. The place was busy and a bit chaotic, and there was a warm, welcoming aroma of garlic. It was a wonderful evening. It was the first time in about a year that everything in the world felt normal. A bowl of carbonara and a glass of wine, and her body breathed a sigh of relief and she relaxed. It didn’t matter that their server was frantically covering twelve tables, they enjoyed the extra time together. She didn’t tell Tom about the forty minutes she’d spent on the government statistics page, but then why would she?
July 2029
Jess was Hannah’s half-sister, her dad’s daughter from his first marriage. She was eight years older than Hannah and worked as a midwife in Leeds. She was the one Hannah talked to regularly: she saw her three or four times a year, they spoke on the phone every month for an hour, and there were frequent messages in between. They always ended up putting the world to rights, but they never started that way. They started with each other’s lives: what work projects they were on, how the open water swimming was going, what dates they’d been on, what family dramas had happened. It was easy to talk to Jess, and Hannah often wished they lived closer.
One Sunday evening in July Hannah got a call. She could hear the beeping from the pelican crossing, a dog barking and traffic noise. Jess often called as she was walking home from work. She was tired, and she was complaining about work again. It didn’t come as a surprise. Jess had been sending WhatsApps for months. The unit was desperately short-staffed, they’d stopped backfilling maternity leave, two of the community midwives had gone and hadn’t been replaced, and everyone was doing twelve hours. It wasn’t the first time Hannah had heard this, but this time Jess was more than upset. She’d seen the same story from friends on social media too.
Jess told her that the patient form had changed, specifically about the father: his name, full address, all his contact details and whether he was aware the woman was having a baby. “None of his section has ever been mandatory,” Jess said. She said it like a fact, not a complaint. (Japan: a married woman needs her husband’s consent for an abortion, and the consent form has a box for his name.) [13]
“Anyway,” she went on, “less about me, I’ll be fine, I always am. Tell me about Tom. I want all the details about your weekend away.”
Hannah could hear from Jess’s tone that she wasn’t just tired, and that work was more than simply exhausting. But she didn’t really know how to help. She was so busy worrying about Jess that she didn’t take in the comment about the new form at all.
September 2029
Come September, sixteen months after Rebuild won the election, Hannah’s firm announced there wouldn’t be any promotions that year. Another all-staff email: “given the current economic uncertainty, the leadership team has taken the difficult decision to pause the annual promotion review”. Hannah had been up for it, and really thought she was going to get it. It was the second year she’d applied. She was qualified and experienced enough, and had been rather disappointed not to get it last time.
Strangely, that same week, Tom was made Acting Head of the floor. Just temporarily. There was no process, no interviews, and nobody knew about it until it was announced, one line at the bottom of the Friday round-up email: “just to keep things steady”, it said.
Hannah was pleased for him, of course, and she meant it. “That’s fantastic, Tom, congratulations. Let’s go for dinner to celebrate.”
Hannah is back in the office early again at the end of the month, doing her expenses in an empty office. She quite likes the lights clicking on as she walks along the central corridor to the other end of the floor. It makes her feel like she’s walking out on stage. She doesn’t have a lot to claim this month. She hasn’t been sent out to as many client meetings, so she does it pretty quickly. The two boxes are still there, with the red stars next to them. She types single in the first box, and none in the second, and presses submit.
She says to herself that it’s just the economy. She’s sure it’s just the economy.
This is the end of part two, thanks for reading. Just a reminder that parts two, three and four are fiction, but part one wasn’t. Every bracket in the text above shows a real place and a real year where this happened in the real world. The full sources are below in the Receipts. Part three is next week, if you want to find out what happens next.
The Receipts // (Sources)
[1] Reform UK, front bench launch press conference, 17 February 2026.
[2] Department of Health and Social Care, Abortion Statistics, England and Wales: 2023, 19 March 2026
[3] Constitutional Tribunal of Poland, case K 1/20, 22nd October 2020. Polish Ministry of Health data, reported by CNN, October 2020.
[4] Amnesty International, “It’s about you too,” Argentina, 2025. Health Policy Watch, December 2025.
[5] Italian Ministry of Health, Report to Parliament on the implementation of Law 194, 2023 data, March 2026.
[6] British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Costs and pricing, bpas.org, September 2026.
[7] Office for Statistics Regulation, Compliance review of Abortion statistics for England and Wales, April 2026. Department of Health and Social Care, Abortion statistics in England and Wales collection, gov.uk, updated 12 May 2026
[8] Amnesty International, “It’s about you too,” Argentina, 2025.
[9] Law 194 of 22 May 1978, Article 16. Italian Ministry of Health, Report to Parliament on the implementation of Law 194, 2023 data, March 2026.
[10] Human Rights Watch, February 2024. International Press Institute, Hungary media reports, 2021.
[11] Reporters Without Borders, Argentina, 2024. Decree 548/2024, 1st July 2024.
[12] House of Commons Canada, Standing Committee on the Status of Women, Report 6, Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada, 16 June 2026.
[13] Maternal Health Act of Japan, Article 14. Waseda University Institute of Comparative Law, “Abortion and Spousal Consent in Japan,” February 2023.
