UK

Buffer Zones: Time to Rethink Abortion and the Carceral State?

by Lucía Berro Pizzarossa and Rishita Nandagiri | Nov 26, 2024

https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/

Image credit: Reed Naliboff via Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-person-holding-a-sign-IjINxe-mc40

On 31 Oct 2024, legislation enacting “buffer zones”—designated areas around abortion clinics where protests and certain forms of interference are prohibited—came into force in England and Wales under the Public Order Act 2023. While frequently presented as a protective measure for patients and healthcare providers, buffer zones also serve as microcosms of the carceral state’s reliance on policing and surveillance as default solutions to social issues.

The Act expanded policing powers to restrict, monitor, and even criminalize protests and dissent. These increased powers directly align with the enforcement of buffer zones, reinforcing a system that prioritizes and reproduces state control over community autonomy and individual rights. Additionally, these expanded powers function in the context of increased investigations and convictions of “illegal abortions” in the UK. The carceral logics underpinning this enforcement thus reframe abortion as a regulated privilege safeguarded by the state rather than an inalienable right. This is not separate from the role of policing as a “protective” force – it (re)asserts the role of the state in governing “acceptable” abortions and in (re)establishing mechanisms of surveillance and disciplining “transgressive” bodies.

Historically, policing in the UK has disproportionately impacted communities made marginal, and extending these powers risks reinforcing existing biases and further eroding human rights. The application of stop and search, for example, is likely to replicate these patterns when used to police protests or enforce buffer zones. This not only further stigmatizes abortion but places additional burdens on those who are already vulnerable to over-policing. By expanding policing powers and creating new offences that criminalize specific types of protests, the Act exacerbates the punitive framework surrounding reproductive rights.

Carceral Logics and Reproductive Justice

The justification for buffer zones often draws on broader public safety narratives, such as protecting against disruptive environmental protests, which normalize increased policing in public spaces. However, the repercussions are significant, setting a dangerous precedent for policing dissenting voices in any movement intersecting with state interests, including reproductive justice. This extension of police powers—to restrict movement, limit association, and monitor gatherings—aligns with carceral feminist critiques, which caution against using punitive methods to achieve social goals. While these powers might protect some individuals in the short term, they also entrench state power, reinforcing the carceral state’s reach into private healthcare decisions and undermining feminist demands for reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice (RJ), which emphasizes equitable access to healthcare free from state interference, demands an acknowledgment of how expanded policing powers compromise reproductive rights. By intensifying state oversight within healthcare environments, the Public Order Act instead risks making abortion clinics more intimidating and less accessible to those already made marginal by systemic discrimination. This carceral expansion starkly contrasts with RJ’s call for community-led, transformative approaches prioritizing lived experiences over punitive regulation.

Implications for Communities Made Marginal

Increased police powers threaten to exacerbate existing inequalities in reproductive healthcare access, particularly for communities who already face institutional racism, misogyny, and homophobia within British law enforcement. Operating within a broader “hostile environment” policy that criminalizes immigrants and asylum seekers, these extended powers risk acting as a care-seeking deterrent. Evidence demonstrates that people of colour, especially migrants, distrust the police due to previous negative interactions, complicating access to abortion clinics under the spectre of police surveillance.

Mehrotra and colleagues contend that neoliberalism, professionalization, and criminalization have narrowed the scope of social change to individual-level interventions. This shift prioritizes physical safety above broader structural changes, reducing the potential for systemic responses and instead contributing to the expansion of the carceral state and, thus, hyper-incarceration. This “fetishizing of safety” limits the focus to protecting individual “victims” from individual “perpetrators.” Prioritizing state protection over systemic reform, buffer zones reinforce an individualistic framework that neglects the root social and economic conditions underlying reproductive injustices.

A genuine commitment to ‘greater protections’ for pregnant people in England and Wales must begin with the immediate repeal of obsolete legislations from 1861 and 1967 that currently regulate abortion. Full decriminalization of abortion and a moratorium on any further criminalization of people for abortion are also imperative. Simultaneously, we must address the deep inequalities that communities of colour, migrants, and people living in rural areas—among others—suffer. Without genuine commitment in the form of targeted policies, funding, and structural reforms, inflating penalties and police powers is counterproductive, perpetuating cycles of inequality that do little to reduce the problems it purports to address.

Conclusion: Reframing Buffer Zones and Reproductive Justice

Abortion is a reproductive justice issue, thus requiring an interrogation of the role of policing in our communities. RJ demands that we envision the potential for other worlds where people can decide if, when, and how to parent without risk of harassment and also raise those children in an environment free of police violence.

We argue that buffer zones are a form of “human rights penality”. While these are presented as a neutral or protective intervention in public space, they subtly embed punitive elements reinforcing carceral paradigms; in practice, they extend state surveillance and control, buttressing a system of regulation and containment. Rather than addressing the root issues, these zones risk legitimizing a framework emphasising punishment over transformative social change. This critique invites us to critically reflect on whether punitive approaches and carcerality align with the visions of reproductive justice, the pursuit of collective liberation and the worlds we aim to build.

About Lucía Berro Pizzarossa and Rishita Nandagiri


Lucía Berro Pizzarossa is a British Academy International Fellow at Birmingham Law School and an Affiliated researcher of the Global Health and Rights Project at The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Her project sits at the intersection of law, social movements, and human rights. She works in solidarity with Women Help Women and various feminist collectives in the self-managed abortion movement. She is one half of the collaborative writing/thinking project, Lucíta Nandarossa.

Rishita Nandagiri is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. Her research focuses on gender and reproductive injustices in the Global Souths. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, and serves on the International Union for the Scientific Study of Populations’ Scientific Panel for Abortion Research. She is one half of the collaborative writing/thinking project, Lucíta Nandarossa.