Surge of funding for dark money anti-abortion group linked to Reform

A US anti-abortion group close to Reform has tripled its spending in the UK since 2020, Good Law Project can reveal.

ADF International (UK) spent more than £1.4m on its activities in the UK last year, according to annual accounts filed this week.

The organisation receives the bulk of its funding from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a US-based Christian conservative legal group that played a key role in the 2022 US Supreme Court decision that overturned federal protections for abortion rights.

The US group has provided more than £4m in funding to its UK arm, a registered charity, since 2018, according to filings with the Charity Commission. Over the same period, ADF International (UK)’s staff has grown from just two employees to 11 in 2025.

As its UK operation has expanded, it has become increasingly active in backing legal cases on behalf of anti-abortion and anti-transgender campaigners, following a strategy long used by its US parent organisation. In the past year alone, it has defended four people charged with breaching safe access zones around abortion clinics, two of whom were later convicted.

The group has actively framed the zones, which prohibit handing out anti-abortion leaflets or obstructing anyone accessing or working at an abortion clinic, as an infringement on freedom of speech.

Last year, the New York Times reported that ADF supplied the Trump administration with attack lines casting the UK as hostile to free speech in private briefings. US vice president JD Vance, himself a conservative Christian, later raised one of the buffer zone cases supported by ADF as an example of what he claimed was the UK “backsliding” on human rights.

ADF describes itself as non-partisan, but over the past year it has forged closer ties with Reform, arranging meetings between its leader Nigel Farage and US officials and inviting party allies to speak at its events. The group reportedly orchestrated Farage’s appearance before the US House Judiciary Committee in September, where he accused the UK government of clamping down on free speech. It also reportedly brokered a secret meeting between Farage and top state department officials in London that same year.

Last year, Farage, who describes himself as “pro-choice” on abortion, said it is “utterly ludicrous” to allow abortion up to 24 weeks and that the law is “totally out of date”.

Other figures close to Reform who have been courted by ADF include the Cambridge professor James Orr, who was invited to speak at its London event in February 2025. Orr, recently appointed Reform’s head of policy, opposes abortion at any stage of foetal development, even in pregnancies resulting from rape.

ADF’s latest UK filings suggest it is increasingly seeking to coordinate its lobbying efforts across Europe. Over the past year, it said it had lobbied against the EU’s Digital Services Act, which it claims has the “potential to negatively affect the rights of Christians to speak about, inter alia, the biblical distinction between male and female and Christian sexual ethics.”

For Katrina McDonnell, a campaigns manager at Good Law Project, this surge in funding sounds the alarm.

“Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the far right in both the UK and the US has felt emboldened,” McDonnell said, “pouring money into anti-abortion groups and ramping up the rhetoric to try and chip away at our reproductive rights. We need to expose these small groups pushing extreme views – or we risk losing our right to choose.”

ADF International (UK) didn’t answer when we asked them for a response.