When MPs backed the enforcement of ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics, there were warnings that the measure might backfire. Two months on from that vote, those consequences are now clear for all to see.
The director of an anti-abortion group is facing prosecution after praying in front of an abortion clinic in Birmingham. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce of UK March for Life is accused of breaching a public space protection order – but she insists she was only exercising her freedom of religion ‘inside the privacy of my own mind’.
Vaughan-Spruce is not accused of harassing anyone. The 45-year-old simply said a prayer inside an exclusion zone. It’s come to something, hasn’t it, when you can be prosecuted after praying, silently or otherwise, under English law? But, of course, the warnings this might happen were there from the outset.
The threat to free speech and free thought posed by the bill has been realised. The legislation – which came about through an amendment to the public order bill – criminalises anyone who seeks to ‘influence’ someone within the buffer zone or who ‘informs or attempts to inform about abortion services by any means’. Note that: ‘any means’. There were already laws against harassment, of course, but for Stella Creasy, who proposed the bill, it seems these measures were insufficient. Those who attempt to ‘advise or persuade or otherwise express (an) opinion’ could also end up in court.
Tory MP Fiona Bruce was one of those who pointed out that this law could be directed at people who simply stood outside clinics in silent prayer, thereby establishing an interesting new development in English law: an unexpressed thought crime. Yet it was passed by a majority of 297 to 110, including a sizeable number of Tories. You can see the voting record here; it makes dispiriting viewing.
Creasy said during the debate she had no wish to curb protesters’ freedom of expression, but this assertion is impossible to square with the terms of the bill. And expressing an opinion at a far distance from a clinic doesn’t serve a purpose, which is to suggest to women entering for an abortion that there is an alternative to the procedure. Some of those protesters will offer financial help or support if those things might help a woman change her mind about abortion, which is, of course, a life-changing decision. These are not US-style militants, but mostly, unassuming, herbivorous Christians.
While abortion is often designated as religious issue, I don’t think that’s right: for me, it’s a moral one, simply premised on the notion that a foetus is a human being, and ending a life is wrong. As it happens, this is also the view of the churches, but it’s hardly exclusive to them. Many pro-lifers, including the admirable Dominic Lawson, are atheist.
As for the right to protest, even Peter Tatchell has said – he told me – that he supports the rights of anti-abortionists to protest outside clinics, even to the extent of holding up pictures of aborted foetuses, though he himself is pro-abortion. I didn’t notice him surfacing in this debate, but he’s pro free speech and free protest, as the MPs who voted for this amendment are not.
No matter. We now have the predicted, anticipated, results of this dreadful amendment, which is that a respectable, otherwise law-abiding and- conscientious woman is being prosecuted after saying prayers in public.
That’s what we’ve come to. Happy now?