A British woman was arrested last month for reportedly standing outside an abortion clinic while praying silently to herself.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, an anti-abortion activist and director of the United Kingdom March for Life, was arrested on camera after being briefly interrogated by police in Birmingham, England.
The incident has sparked vigorous debate in the UK and worldwide over free speech concerns and the “buffer zones” being established around abortion clinics.
Video footage shows Vaughan-Spruce, 45, standing on a sidewalk with her hands in her jacket while three officers approached her.
“What are you here for today?” one of the officers asked Vaughan-Spruce.
“Physically, I am just standing here,” she replied.
“Why here, of all places?” the officer pressed.
Vaughan-Spruce then said she was standing there because it was in front of an “abortion center.”
“Is standing here part of the protest?” the officer asked. Vaughan-Spruce replied that she was not protesting at all.
“Are you praying?” the officer asked. Vaughan-Spruce then admitted that she “may be praying in [her] head.”
The officer then asked her to “voluntarily” come to the police station, to which Vaughan-Spruce said that, if she had a choice, her answer was “No.”
“Okay, then you are under arrest on suspicion of failing to comply with Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO),” the officer remarked.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vaughan-Spruce said that she has prayed outside of abortion clinics for 20 years. However, in September 2022, the local government of Birmingham instituted a “censorship zone” around the abortion clinic.
The so-called “censorship zone” prohibits protesting, which includes prayer and counseling in its definition.
“Four times, I went and stood near the closed abortion center and silently prayed there,” Vaughan-Spruce explained in the interview. “And as you can see, the police came and asked me if I was protesting, which I wasn’t.”
“They asked me if I was praying, and I said I might be silently praying. I was arrested,” she concluded.
Vaughan-Spruce then recounted how she was formally arrested, searched, and interrogated by police. The subjects of their questions allegedly included the contents of her silent prayers.
She was later released on bail with a court date in February 2023 to face four counts of “protesting and engaging in an act intimidating of service users.”
Carlson called arresting someone for the act of silently praying “an act of evil.”
An online petition supporting Vaughan-Spruce titled “Prayer is not thought crime” has already garnered nearly 50,000 signatures.
An aide to the late former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Nile Gardiner, tweeted about the incident, “This is appalling.”
He continued, saying it is “[d]isgraceful to see a woman arrested for simply praying on a British street. This should not be happening under a Conservative Govt, and action should be taken by the Home Secretary to ensure that scenes like this are not repeated.”
In a statement to The Epoch Times, a police spokesman said, “The PSPO creates a zone around a specific facility to protect women from harassment by any means if they are seeking a medical procedure or advice at an abortion clinic.”
Such “buffer zones” around abortion clinics, intended to keep anti-abortion demonstrators away, are becoming more common in the United Kingdom.
A bill to create these buffer zones across England and Wales was passed by the House of Commons in October and is well on its way to becoming law. If the bill passes through the remaining stages of the legislative process, any anti-abortion demonstrator found within 150 meters of an abortion clinic could face up to six months in jail.
Currently, buffer zones like the one Vaughan-Spruce is accused of violating are established on a case-by-case basis by local authorities.
“The PSPO protecting the area around Robert Clinic focuses on ensuring people visiting and working there have clear access without fear of confrontation. Any local authority seeking to implement a PSPO must have robust evidence for its introduction, which guides the conditions and location – this includes concerns and complaints received from the community,” stated a Birmingham City Council spokesperson when the order was approved.