Sexual and reproductive rights in Europe are increasingly part of an intense struggle. This includes legal contestation through litigation and third-party interventions at, in particular, the European Court of Human Rights. It is however important to recognize that contestation also takes place in other, political and public, arenas. Interconnected actions, forming part of a broader European conservative right mission, includes political and legal action in many other arenas, including in the European as well as national parliaments.

This struggle is about a political and religious backlash to a largely secular, progressive cultural and human rights revolution. It confronts opposing sides of (transnational) civil society, who both make moral, “sacred” claims, while profaning the opponent. Here, I will first discuss the European conservative right’s mission, the sacred dimensions to this mission, and its increasingly dense transnational network. I will then exemplify cases of struggle by turning to initiatives both on the European level (the promotion of a right to abortion as part of the European Charter and the ECI campaign My Voice, My Choice) and domestic parliamentary debates (the Netherlands).

The European Right’s “sacred” mission

Struggles around sexual and reproductive rights pit more liberally, progressive-oriented or “frontlash” actors against other, including non-liberal, often radical-conservative “backlash” organizations. In the actions of the latter, religion is an explicit and core dimension. The European Right – linking a variety of right-wing populist actors with radical, religious-conservative ones – is active on various fronts in order to promote an alternative vision to what are often indicated as “woke liberalism”, ”progressive ideology”, “gender ideology”, and the alleged European liberal hegemony. The supranational project of European integration and its complex human rights regimes, both in terms of the European Union and the Council of Europe, are a core target of these groups.

The European Right’s “sacred” mission is grounded in religion and religious claims. Religion – in the form of distinctive interpretations or utilisations of Christianity – is of strategic value and is instrumentalised in variegated courses of action. It forms the background for proposals for fundamental reform of the European institutions, it is used as a justification for strengthening national sovereignty, it serves as a fundamental value basis for contesting progressive rights promotion, and it provides a key legitimation for the restriction of rights on the domestic level. Regarding rights, there are roughly five areas where radical-conservative counter-movements are predominantly active, in particular in terms of third-party interventions, but not only: a) Right to family, parental authority; b) Sexual/gender identity; c) Reproductive practices; d) Euthanasia, and e) Freedom of expression. In recent years, these areas have become increasingly contested.

The sacred and the profane

The argument here follows a cultural- and political-sociological approach, and is inspired by Durkheim and later sociologists building on his work. From this sociological perspective, radical-conservative actors seek to construct an alternative to liberal understandings of rights, by the profaning or desacralising of what they see as hegemonic, liberal understandings of rights. Contemporary “backlash movements” put the hegemonic sacred (etym. “sacer, holy, dedicated to a god”) and profane (etym. “outside of the temple”) distinctions on their heads, by criticising “sacred” civil, liberal characterisations of rights – such as the liberal emphases on universalism, individualism, equality, and emancipatory rights extensions for minority groups – and turn them into profane – i.e. polluted, impure – ones (as promoting hyper-individualism, endorsing non-natural, “deviant” forms of behaviour that defy “natural” ones). In this, radical conservatives claim the status of victims for those who hold religious, that is, Christian views.

Radical-conservative actors might be understood as heterodox movements, in that they contest the alleged hegemony of secular, liberal understandings of rights, and their main forms of institutionalisation. One often repeated argument from the radical-conservative right is that liberalism undermines the religious dimensions of societies. In this, they lay claim to their “sacred”’ commitments (“deeply held values that are non-negotiable”) and the sacrality of their positions, which denies such “sacred” status to the positions of the opposition (including liberal, pro-choice standpoints).

What is ”sacred” or “absolute” is expressed in recurrent claims in both judicial and political contexts. This includes an insistence on subsidiarity and national sovereignty, not least to protect national value (Christian) communities from European intervention. The radical-conservative right further stresses (“sacralises”) the collective over the individual, for instance, in terms of “sacrificial motherhood” (the subjection of the role of the mother to the “needs” of society, including in demographic terms), relating children’s rights and the status of the family to the best interest of the whole society, claiming euthanasia is not a strictly private matter, or safeguarding the majority’s (religious) feelings against blasphemous statements by individuals in the public sphere.

The networked European right

The “sacred” mission of radical-conservative actors is transnationally organised in various networks. One instance is a network called “Agenda Europe”, which has links to various radical-conservative actors that engage in political and legal mobilisation. In its key statement, Restoring the Natural Order (original version: 2014¹⁾), the religious, sacred dimension is justified through natural law, strongly endorsed as an antidote to the “Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s which has allegedly led to a “process of de-civilisation”. Natural law is put forward as a civilising force, while human rights are profaned as at best a pseudo-religion: “human rights documents are no absolute truths, but the outcome of a political process”. Natural law is instead ”independent of politics, or of the human will”. In fact, “[t]here is a Natural Law, which human reason can discern and understand, but which human will cannot alter” (italics added). In relation to the right to abortion, the preface of the document states that “[t]he culture of life associated with Christianity has been largely abandoned and replaced by a veritable ‘culture of death’, which, out of inner necessity, will destroy from within any society that accepts and allows it”.

A right to abortion in the EU Charter

Understood in Restoring the Natural Order as an “encouraging” recent development, one clear point of rupture in relation to the right to abortion is the reversal of the Roe v. Wade judgment (1973) by the United States Supreme Court, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation (2022). In this judgment, the Supreme Court pushed the right to abortion into a more restrictive, conservative direction by rejecting abortion as a constitutional right and leaving authority to regulate to individual states. This constitutes a major turning point in the US, but equally provoked a reaction on the other side of the Atlantic, prompting attempts to safeguard achievements around the right to abortion in European states (culminating for instance in France in the constitutionalisation of the right to abortion in 2024).

On the European level, it mobilised political forces in the European Parliament to adopt a resolution that called for the recognition of the right to abortion in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, and which explicitly stated it acted against a pushback on gender equality and SHRH [sexual and reproductive health and rights] backsliding and to constitutionally protect the rights that are under attack. In the related parliamentary debate, the initiators (of Renew) called for the entrenchment of the right to abortion in the European Charter, while opposing, right-wing actors claimed that the European Union should defend the right to life as well as children’s rights, and not promote a (profane) “culture of death”.

Rights contestation in domestic arenas

The campaign for a European right to abortion equally triggered reactions in domestic arenas. Let us take as an example the Netherlands, a country that until recently was considered a pioneer in the advancement of progressive rights. Here, two motions, initiated by the conservative-Calvinist SGP, and supported by radical-conservative and populist parties, were adopted by the Dutch parliament in March 2025. The government was asked to evaluate the consequences of the abolition of a 5-day period of reconsideration for women who want to abort, as of January 1, 2023. The second motion asked to anticipate the evaluation regarding abortion procedures (currently planned for 2028). While for the SGP the motions were to investigate into an explosive increase in abortions, according to the centre for sexual expertise “Rutgers”, the two motions could have negative implications for the right of self-determination of women.

In reaction, Dutch left-progressive actors put forward a parliamentary motion for the recognition of a right to abortion in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights as well as in the UN Covenant of Civic and Political Rights in September 2025. The intention was to safeguard (“sacralise”) the right to abortion in a world in which it is increasingly endangered. This motion provoked a further counter-move by conservative, religious political groups, to urge the government to prevent the adoption of the right to abortion in European treaties (insisting on the national prerogative to regulate abortion). According to them, countries ought to retain the sovereign right to regulate abortion in ways they see fit, while the EU allegedly is trying to impose its (profaning) values on member states in areas such as marriage, sexuality or abortion.

My Voice, My Choice Initiative

Returning to the European level, the European Citizens’ Initiative My Voice, My Choice was equally a reaction to the developments around Roe v Wade in the US, as well as to the situation in certain European countries with de jure or de facto restrictions on abortion. The ECI managed to collect over a million signatures, meaning it was successful. On 2 December, the European Parliament held a hearing with the My Voice, My Choice campaigners. And on 17 December, the Parliament voted – with 358 votes – in favour of a related motion.

The visibility of the campaign provoked a clear reaction from radical-conservative forces. In preceding months, Agenda Europe had claimed on its blog that it is “in fact a resounding defeat for the abortion lobby”, not least because the earlier “diametrically opposed” ECI One of Us gathered 1.7 million signatures in 2014. One of the promoters of this ECI claimed that “[t]his result proves once again that Europe is pro-life at its core”. The ECI depicted the liberal-progressive position in profane, impure terms, denouncing abortion as “prenatal child murder”, a call for EU-funded “abortion tourism”, and a “normalisation of baby-killing”, while understanding human dignity in the sacred terms of including the dignity of all human beings, ostensibly including “children in utero”. In the Netherlands, the pro-life organisation Schreeuw om het leven (Cry for Life) organised a petition campaign to be presented to the Dutch Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. And in the run-up the December hearings and vote, various counter-events were organised at the EP, such “Real Choice Means Real Support” and “My Voice My Choice: A Legal, Moral and Financial Fraud”. The pro-abortion motion was accompanied 4 other motions against abortion, tabled by radical-conservative right-wing MEPs and party groups, stressing the principle of subsidiarity, the lack of EU competence, respect for national identity, and “motherhood as an essential contribution to society”.

Conclusion

The battle over the sacred and profane is evidently not a new phenomenon in Europe (just think of the debates over the preamble of the European Constitution or the Lautsi v Italy case). What does seem novel is the intensity, visibility, and active engagement in multiple arenas of increasingly well-organised radical-conservative actors, greatly facilitated by an ever more hostile international environment.