Pro-choice professor in the UK receives £500K in taxpayer funds to write book about abortion

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has awarded £512,000 ($635,340) to a pro-choice professor to write a book about the history of abortion in Britain.

Sally Sheldon, a law professor at the University of Kent, has been asked to write a "biographical study" of the 1967 Abortion Act, which made the procedure legal in the U.K.

According to the Daily Mail, Sheldon was an architect of a bill that would allow abortion to be conducted without legal restrictions for any reason up to birth. The measure was put forward by the Labour MP for Hull, Diana Johnson, last month.

The professor is also a trustee of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which is the largest provider of abortions to the National Health Service (NHS).

Sheldon has campaigned for abortion on demand for over 20 years, and she has written in favor of sex-selective abortions. She publicly opposed a proposal that would ban sex-selective abortions, calling it "flawed" and "criminalizing women."

Sheldon intends to present the findings of her two-year tax-payer funded research to the U.K. Parliament in April 2018. Part of the project involves the creation of teaching packs for schools and a website for children about abortion.

She has recruited three other academics to take part in the study, two of whom publicly expressed their support for sex-selective abortions.

The grant was criticized by Labor MP Robert Flello, who questioned whether the professor would give a fair and balanced presentation.

"If public money is going to be used to fund work that is not only going to be a book but is going to fund materials going into our schools in support of pro-abortion propaganda, then it is an utterly outrageous use of public money," said Flello.

"At a time when people are not being able to get access to wheelchairs, when people are having hospital appointments delayed, to have public money squandered in this way is just disgraceful," he added.

The study, which begins in May, will be presented at the 50th-anniversary celebration of the legalization of abortion in Britain.

Sheldon has described the 1967 Act, which legalized abortion with the approval of two doctors but prohibits the procedure after 24 weeks unless the fetus has a disability, as "a remnant of the attitude of a previous age."

The Arts and Humanities Research Council, the tax disbursement body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, had also funded a study that recommended the removal of the terms "ladies" and "gents" from public toilets in case they offended transgender users.