{"id":653405,"date":"2025-12-25T03:43:27","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T03:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/653405\/"},"modified":"2025-12-25T03:43:27","modified_gmt":"2025-12-25T03:43:27","slug":"abortion-protest-charge-is-attack-on-free-speech-us-tells-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/653405\/","title":{"rendered":"Abortion protest charge is attack on free speech, US tells Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration has accused the UK government of \u201cundermining free speech\u201d after a woman was charged for praying outside an abortion clinic.<\/p>\n

The US State Department described the arrest of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, 48, outside a clinic in Birmingham as an attack on \u201creligious liberty\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United Kingdom has just charged charity worker Isabel Vaughan-Spruce under their \u2018buffer zone\u2019 law for standing on a sidewalk and silently praying,\u201d the office of the under secretary for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, wrote on X.<\/p>\n

\u201cMake no mistake \u2014 this undermines free speech and religious liberty. The United States supports Isabel and all those who risk persecution for defending life, faith<\/a>, and freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vaughan-Spruce had been arrested twice before for breaching local buffer zones. She will appear in court on January 29.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and came into effect in October 2024.<\/p>\n

Illegal protests are defined as anything \u201ccausing harassment, alarm or distress\u201d to someone trying to \u201caccess, provide, or facilitate the provision of abortion services\u201d. Breaking the law is punishable by an unlimited fine.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Britain doesn\u2019t need new blasphemy laws<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, JD Vance,<\/a> the vice-president, said it was an example of how free speech in Europe was \u201cin retreat\u201d.<\/p>\n

He singled out the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist from Bournemouth, who was arrested in 2022 for \u201cdeliberately\u201d 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 \u00a39,000 in costs and given a two-year conditional discharge.<\/p>\n

\"Adam<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d Vance said, highlighting the case in February.<\/p>\n

\u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 On front line of anti-abortion buffer zones after JD Vance\u2019s attack<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking on Fox News earlier this week, Lara Trump, the president\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Trump described the story as \u201cpretty unbelievable\u201d, \u201creally egregious\u201d and \u201cnot a very unique situation\u201d because of \u201ccensorship\u201d in the UK.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration has accused the UK government of \u201cundermining free speech\u201d after a woman was charged for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-653405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115778146398010625","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}