Isabel Vaughan-Spruce is a pro-life volunteer in the UK who hit international headlines last week when the West Midlands Police paid her £13,000 compensation for wrongful arrest. On two occasions, she had been arrested for engaging in silent prayer within a “buffer zone” outside an abortion clinic. Buffer zones are geographic areas around abortion clinics; activities like protesting or counselling against abortion are typically banned within these zones. Vaughan-Spruce was arrested under a local bylaw specific to that area, but buffer zones are now expected to come into effect nation-wide under a new law passed by the UK Parliament. Despite Vaughan-Spruce’s victory, there is concern that this will introduce a more restrictive regime.
Britain’s new law bans activities that “influence” someone’s decision to “access, provide, or facilitate” abortion services. Could this include silent prayer? Draft guidance issued by the UK’s last Government stated, “Silent prayer, being the engagement of the mind and thought in prayer towards God, is protected as an absolute right under the Human Rights Act 1998 and should not, on its own, be considered to be an offence under any circumstances.” However, since the UK’s election and change of Government, there have been reports that the guidance will be revised to specify that silent prayer is prohibited inside a buffer zone.
The issue of silent prayer was raised when our Parliament introduced “safe areas”, the equivalent of buffer zones, in 2022. Inside a safe area, New Zealand’s law prohibits activities like trying to persuade someone not to access abortion, obstructing them, or protesting. Safe areas can extend up to 150 metres from the premises of an abortion clinic. During Parliamentary debates, it was clear that MPs wanted to protect women accessing abortion from harassment or intimidation, what one MP described as the “hallway of shame” and as “hav[ing]to run the gauntlet” on the way in to the clinic.
However, when the law was debated in Parliament, then-Government MPs said that it would not capture silent prayer. The Attorney-General at the time wrote, “communicative activities which cannot be regarded as a ‘protest’ and might commonly be seen at or near a hospital (such as an individual engaging in silent prayer) will not risk being criminalised.” Our law seems slightly narrower than the UK’s version, partly because when our law was making its way through Parliament, MPs removed a proposed prohibition on “communication” inside a safe area.
There are still legal grey areas though. For example, MPs debated whether whether a nun praying silently inside a safe area while holding rosary beads would be criminalised. When beliefs begin to manifest externally like this, in ways that could be apparent to the women that Parliament wanted to protect, there is a greater risk that they will be captured by the safe areas law. Similarly, while the UK’s draft guidance protected silent prayer, it warned that prayer accompanied by “intrusive” conduct “is likely to be an offence”. And of course, the interpretation of the law may change in the future, as it apparently may do in the UK. For now, New Zealand’s pro-life volunteers could use MPs’ debate statements in their defence if they were charged after praying silently outside an abortion clinic. But even then, they should tread very carefully in a safe area.
Image credit: ADF UK (pictured: Isabel Vaughan-Spruce)
