The Trump administration has accused the UK government of “undermining free speech” after a woman was charged for praying outside an abortion clinic.
The US State Department described the arrest of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, 48, outside a clinic in Birmingham as an attack on “religious liberty”.
“The United Kingdom has just charged charity worker Isabel Vaughan-Spruce under their ‘buffer zone’ law for standing on a sidewalk and silently praying,” the office of the under secretary for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, wrote on X.
“Make no mistake — this undermines free speech and religious liberty. The United States supports Isabel and all those who risk persecution for defending life, faith, and freedom.”
Vaughan-Spruce had been arrested twice before for breaching local buffer zones. She will appear in court on January 29.
Her prosecution appears to be the first time that Section 9 of the Public Order Act 2023, otherwise known as the buffer zone law, has been used to charge someone in England. The law establishes protest-free zones of up to 150m around abortion clinics and came into effect in October 2024.
Illegal protests are defined as anything “causing harassment, alarm or distress” to someone trying to “access, provide, or facilitate the provision of abortion services”. Breaking the law is punishable by an unlimited fine.
• Britain doesn’t need new blasphemy laws
Amid an outcry from Christian organisations, senior figures in the Trump administration have repeatedly weighed in on the law and accused the British government of silencing protesters.
In a speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, JD Vance, the vice-president, said it was an example of how free speech in Europe was “in retreat”.
He singled out the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist from Bournemouth, who was arrested in 2022 for “deliberately” ignoring a public space protection order around an abortion clinic. After remonstrating with a community officer for one hour and forty minutes after he was ordered to move on, Smith-Connor was ordered to pay £9,000 in costs and given a two-year conditional discharge.
“I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs,” Vance said, highlighting the case in February.
“A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”
• On front line of anti-abortion buffer zones after JD Vance’s attack
Speaking on Fox News earlier this week, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, also raised the case of Clive Johnston, who was arrested for holding an open-air service near an abortion clinic in Northern Ireland in 2024.
Trump described the story as “pretty unbelievable”, “really egregious” and “not a very unique situation” because of “censorship” in the UK.
Abortion is illegal in 13 US states after the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022. In nine of these states there are no exceptions in cases of rape and incest.