Harry Styles calls for ‘backlash’ against attacks on abortion rights

Harry Styles is the latest star to speak out against the Supreme Court’s potential decision to overturn Roe v Wade.

During an interview on SiriusXM’s Howard Stern Show on Wednesday, Styles said that the United States appeared to be moving “backwards” after a leaked opinion draft indicated that the court intended to overturn the key ruling that legalised abortion nearly 50 years ago.

“There’s a lot of people who are taking, I think, the right steps to try to make positive things happening,” the As It Was singer told Stern. “I think people who don’t like that are kind of clawing to grapple back any ground that they feel like they’ve lost, which never belonged to them in the first place.”

“I just don’t think that anyone should be able to make decisions about anyone else’s body. It doesn’t really make any sense to me,” he said. “It’s just so backwards.”

Styles added, “It‘s quite scary to see just how far backwards we’re going in a lot of ways. There should be backlash and uproar for these things.”

The 28-year-old singer’s comments come after Politico published a leaked draft opinion on 2 May that appeared to be authored by Justice Samuel Alito, which stated that the court’s conservative majority will uphold a Mississippi law criminalising abortion care at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

A formal decision is expected to be made on the Mississippi case, Dobbs vs Jason Women’s Health Organization, in the next coming weeks. If overturned, the ruling could end decades of constitutional protections for abortion care, and allow states to create their own laws surrounding abortion.

Harry Styles joins fellow singers Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo in publicly defending abortion access in the US. Two days after the opinion draft was published, Olivia Rodrigo spoke out against the potential Supreme Court decision during a concert in Washington, DC.

“Because we’re in DC, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk about how heartbroken I am over the Supreme Court’s potential decision,” the 19-year-old pop star said. “Our bodies should never be in the hands of politicians and I hope we can use our voices to protect our right to have a safe abortion, which is a right that so many people before us have worked so hard to get.”

On 3 May, Phoebe Bridgers revealed that she had an abortion in October of last year while she was on tour. “I went to Planned Parenthood where they gave me the abortion pill. It was easy. Everyone deserves that kind of access,” the 27-year-old musician wrote on social media, adding several links to abortion funds.

Harry Styles’s third studio album, Harry’s House, drops on Friday 20 May. Read Mark Beaumont’s four-star review of the album here.