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Canary in the coalmine: trade unions need to wake up to women’s rights
Research is confirming the massive rise in anti-women politics across the world, writes HAILEY MAXWELL, and if our unions are to fight back, they will need a radical reformation of their institutional culture
Campaigners for Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign (Waspis) gather at the statue of political activist Mary Barbour, the woman who led rent strikes during the First World War, in Govan, Glasgow, to mark International Women's Day, August 18, 2023

MY daily bus commute to work used to take me past the gates of the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. Relatively often I would see a small group of people standing outside the hospital bearing placards decrying the evils of abortion and the rights of the unborn child.

The spectacle was so roundly pathetic and visibly necrotising in terms of both message and messengers that I wrote off the scene as merely another of Glasgow’s nasty Victorian heirlooms which would expire with the crusade’s last elderly soldiers.

How wrong I was. Less than a decade later, a growing number of anti-abortion protesters regularly host “vigils” outside various medical clinics and hospitals — in particular the maternity ward of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and the Sandyford Clinic.

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