The Westminster Government is set to introduce censorship zones at the end of October that will criminalise prayer and offers of help to pregnant women outside abortion centres.
From 31 October, people could receive an unlimited fine for “anything that intentionally or recklessly influences someone’s decision to use abortion services, obstructs them, or causes harassment or distress” within 150m of buildings where abortions are carried out.
The Government has ditched previous guidance which specifically told the police that silent prayer should not be criminalised, and the College of Policing and Crown Prosecution Service will publish new guidance in the coming weeks.
Silent prayer
Heidi Stewart, the head of abortion giant British Pregnancy Advisory Service, pushed the Home Office to outlaw “all forms of harassment”, claiming that the law was “designed to address the harm caused by so-called silent prayer and ‘consensual communication'”.
But Bishop Sherrington of the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales emphasised that religious freedom “includes the right to manifest one’s private beliefs in public through witness, prayer and charitable outreach, including outside abortion facilities”.
Jeremiah Igunnubole, Legal Counsel for religious liberty group Alliance Defending Freedom, highlighted that three people have already been prosecuted within council-imposed zones for “nothing more than praying silently in their minds near an abortion clinic”.
He said: “Unless there is clarity that there is a protected human right to freedom of thought, and to engage in consensual conversation, innocent people could be wrongly criminalised.”
‘Censorship’
Last month, pro-life campaigner Isabel Vaughan-Spruce received £13,000 and an apology from the police after being wrongfully arrested for silently praying inside a Birmingham council censorship zone.
The Director of March for Life UK has been arrested twice by West Midlands Police. In the first instance she was cleared by a magistrates’ court of wrongdoing, while on the second occasion the investigation was dropped.
Vaughan-Spruce warned that with “Christian thought and prayer increasingly under the threat of censorship”, the introduction of national censorship zones “will likely lead to further violations against the freedom to pray, or peacefully converse or offer help near abortion facilities”.
Scotland’s censorship zones will come into force next week, while Northern Ireland introduced them in 2023 and the Republic of Ireland’s President signed The Health (Termination of Pregnancy Services) (Safe Access Zones) Act 2024 into law earlier this year.
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