Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, director of anti-abortion group March for Life UK, was arrested after being accused of violating the council’s ‘buffer zone’ which bans protest nearby.
The arrest of catholic woman for ‘praying’ outside an abortion clinic has been slammed as a ‘thoughtcrime’ by her supporters while critics accused her of trying to ‘harass women’.
She was confronted by a police officer when she was standing on the street outside the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham.
She had been standing there some time, and was not carrying a sign, when an officer approached after a complaint from a member of the public on December 6.
She was arrested by police after she said she might have prayed in her head.
The West Midlands Police officer told the campaigner that he had to caution her and then asked her: ‘What are you here for today?’
‘Physically, I’m just standing here,’ Mss Vaughan-Spruce, from Malvern, Worcestershire, replied.
‘Why here of all places? I know you don’t live nearby,’ the officer asked.
She responded: ‘But this is an abortion centre.’
The officer said: ‘Okay, that’s why you’re stood here. Are you here as part of a protest? Are you praying?’
She denied she was protesting but when asked if she was praying she said: ‘I might be praying in my head, but not out loud.’
The officer then arrested her on suspicion of failing to comply with a public spaces protection order as the 45-year-old is charged with four counts of violating buffer zone.
She is now due to appear at Birmingham Magistrates Court on February 2 charged with four counts of failing to comply with a Public Space Protection Order.
Her arrest is what has already sparked a fierce debate, with supporters saying she has effectively been arrested for ‘thoughtcrime’, a term which her legal representatives ADF UK used.
ADF UK are a British branch of American the conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, who have campaigned and lobbied against the right to an abortion and against the decriminalisation of homsexuality in the States.
The order introduced on September 7 makes it illegal to protest by engaging in act of approval or disapproval, including prayer and protest in a buffer zone around the clinic on Station Road.
The Birmingham City Council order says that: ‘This includes but is not limited to graphic, verbal or written means, prayer or counselling.
‘Interfering, or attempting to interfere, whether verbally or physically, with a Robert Clinic service user, visitor or member of staff.
‘Intimidating or harassing, or attempting to intimidate or harass, a Robert Clinic service user, visitor or a member of staff.
‘Recording or photographing a Robert Clinic service user, visitor or member of staff.
‘Displaying any text or images relating directly or indirectly to the termination of pregnancy.’
The council have said that the measure was need so that people visiting and working at the clinic ‘have clear access without fear of confrontation’.
MPs voted to introduce buffer zones around abortion clinics in October after Labour proposed an amendment to the Public Order Bill to make it an offence to intimidate or harass anyone within 150 metres of the buildings.
Anyone found guilty of breaching the zone to intimidate, threaten or persuade women will face a fine or six months’ imprisonment, increasing to two years for repeat offences.
Vaughn-Spruce, 45 said in her defense: ‘It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind.
‘Censorship zones purport to ban harassment, which is already illegal. Nobody should ever be subject to harassment.
‘But what I did was the furthest thing from harmful – I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind.
‘Nobody should be criminalised for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.’
