We’re moving office this week. And in the boxes hidden in cupboards we’ve been reminded that it was not so long ago that mention of abortion in the news pushed your story far from the headlines, sitting in a corner of an inside page, hoping readers wouldn’t take umbrage. Not so any more.

We’re coming out of a week where safe access zones have finally rolled out across the last part of the UK and Ireland, where women have been speaking openly about their experiences of harassment, and where abortion is the almighty shadow cast over Tuesday’s US election.

For many, silence on reproductive rights is no longer an option.

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Looking at it from the outside, it can be hard to explain quite how abortion became the spark that lit the flame under this US election. For people who don’t spend their lives with their eyes on abortion politics, it probably started with the overturning of Roe v Wade, maybe with Trump’s first election, maybe with the death of iconic pro-choice Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsberg.

The reality is harder though – and more deeply entrenched. It’s the result of decades of legal maneuvering by anti-abortion fanatics whose desire to limit women’s choices, it turns out, extends far beyond abortion to contraception, IVF, and our right to vote. It’s the divorcing of decision-makers from the voters who have – given the chance – voted for abortion rights in ever-increasing numbers. It’s the wholesale radicalisation of a political wing who have established a system which allows them to pour money into removing women’s most basic rights.

I’ll be clear - that’s not where we are here. In the UK, nearly 90% of people believe in a woman’s right to choose – even where we wouldn’t have an abortion ourselves, we don’t believe it’s our business to tell others they mustn’t. The US is a cautionary tale, not a template. But the fear it sows pervades.

For women, that fear isn’t just about politics. At its core it’s about disenfranchisement, disempowerment, of the safety that you had counted on for 50 years always being one bad election, one deranged candidate away from removal. It’s a fear that power over our own bodies is given to us, not owed to us. No matter how unlikely, it’s an increasingly difficult fear to shake.

To be an abortion provider in this time you may think is challenging – but the opposite is true. It’s a vocation, a duty, and a moral responsibility to ensure that what has happened to women in the US can never happen here.

That isn’t for want of trying by people who oppose a woman’s right to choose. We are here not because Britain is immune to this opposition, but because in the darkness, advocates like us have spent decades fighting off attempts to dismantle women’s rights. Whether that was by sweeping weeks off the abortion time limit, forcing women into counselling with anti-abortion organisations, requiring them to wait for days after they’ve made their decision, or forcing them to travel for care they could receive at home.  

Wave after wave of attempts, fought off by people deeply committed to a woman’s right to choose – committed despite knowing that the wider public, the press, would never know about their battles. That their names and their victories would live in boxes, in cupboards, silently propping up women’s rights.

So while American women’s lives hang in the balance, we are not blind to their fear.

As we march forwards with reproductive rights – with safe access zones, with proposals to decriminalise abortion – we should remember that as the light shines bright on abortion and women who need it,  if we in the UK have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Rachael Clarke is the Chief of Staff for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service