It's easy to feel like we live in a pretty progressive era for women's reproductive rights in England, Scotland and Wales. In the last year alone, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to repeal the 8th, women in England (but not Northern Ireland) can take the abortion pill at home (thanks Matt Hancock) and both Ealing and Richmond councils have banned anti-abortion protests outside clinics in their boroughs.
But, every now and then something comes up that reminds us of the threat posed to those rights. Right now, it's an anti-abortion protestor by the name of Eamonn Murphy who has been posing as a legitimate abortion provider online in an attempt to trick women.
Murphy currently faces legal action for doing this, targeting women when they search online for information about getting a termination. In a nutshell, he's a one man fake abortion news machine.
The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) has written to Murphy to request that he stop posing as their UK abortion clinics after he set up a website under the same name as My Options, an official phone line for women seeking abortion.
The Timesreported today that he has been sent a cease and desist letter by the Health and Safety Executive. But this isn't the first time that Eamon Murphy has been in hot water. He is the registered as the Co-director of Pro-Life Alliance and The Times found that he was behind a campaign that told women that abortion made them 800% more likely to develop Breast Cancer. The newspaper also found that he was behind a fake report circulated on Youtube that showed an abortion being performed at an Irish hospital in 2013.
It doesn't end there: Eamon Murphy was also found by the abortion rights campaign to be the registered owner of a website that claimed to give 'non-judgmental abortion advice on unplanned pregnancy' and bought paid Google ads for keyword searches that included 'how to get an abortion in Ireland', 'getting an abortion in Ireland' and 'I need an abortion in Ireland'.
This is a story about how fake news is being peddled to actively harm women with misinformation. It's an insidious way of targeting women who are in the early stages of seeking help for an abortion, capturing them as early as their first Google search.
So, as much as it might feel like we're living thorough a progressive time for protecting women's reproductive decisions, this is a stark reminder that the anti-abortion lobbying is still a big problem in the UK.
We need to start defining this kind of anti-abortion lobbying - whether digital or physical - as what it is: harassment, and an infringement on privacy.