A pro-life activist was arrested by the police after she told them she “might” be praying near a closed abortion facility in the UK.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the director of the UK March for Life, was standing near the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, when police approached her after a bystander complained she might be praying outside the abortion facility.
Authorities in Birmingham established a buffer zone around abortion facilities, making it unlawful for anybody to carry out or attempt to carry out any act of support for or opposition to abortion, even by “verbal or written means” such as “prayer or counseling.”
“It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind,” Vaughan-Spruce said. “I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind. Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.”
“My faith is a central part of who I am, so sometimes I’ll stand or walk near an abortion facility and pray about this issue,” she added. “This is something I’ve done pretty much every week for around the last 20 years of my life. I pray for my friends who have experienced abortion, and for the women who are thinking about going through it themselves.”
Vaughan-Spruce stood near the abortion facility three times while it was closed and claimed she “might” have been praying. When police showed her pictures of herself standing outside the facility and asked if she was praying, she claimed she was unable to respond because she had both spent time praying and had become distracted at other times.
“It is truly astonishing that the law has granted local authorities such wide and unaccountable discretion, that now even thoughts deemed ‘wrong’ can lead to a humiliating arrest and a criminal charge,” Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) UK, which is supporting Vaughan-Spruce, said. “A mature democracy should be able to differentiate between criminal conduct and the peaceful exercise of constitutionally protected rights.”
Igunnubole described Vaughan-Spruce as a woman of “good character … who has tirelessly served her community” through her charity work in assistance of women and children, but said she “has been treated no better than a violent criminal.”
“We are at serious risk of mindlessly sleepwalking into a society that accepts, normalizes, and even promotes the ‘tyranny of the majority,’” he added.
As part of her bail terms, police prohibited Vaughan-Spruce from openly praying in locations other than the abortion center.
