UK Woman Arrested for Praying Outside Abortion Clinic Speaks Out on Tucker Carlson Tonight
As Christians around the world celebrate the birth of Christ this season, it is important to note that many powerful people believe that faith in God is a primitive mode of thinking among oafish souls that should be eliminated. Even when one is praying silently in public.
A British woman was arrested for silently praying near a Birmingham, England abortion center, as reported by Fox News. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was detained under a new protest prohibition statute, or a Public Spaces Protection Order.
In September, Birmingham authorities established a buffer zone around abortion clinics, so any act or attempted act of approval or disapproval as it relates to abortion — including “verbal or written means” like “prayer or counseling” — is considered illegal.
Silent prayer, apparently, qualifies as an attempted verbal act? What next? Computer chips in our brains to monitor our thoughts? If you’re not frightened by this, you should be. You should be very, very afraid.
Police approached Vaughan-Spruce, the director of the U.K. March for Life, near the BPAS Robert Clinic after an onlooker reported she might be praying outside the abortion facility, according to Fox.
Vaughn-Spruce has engaged in silent prayer outside clinics for close to twenty years and said dozens of women who had decided to terminate their pregnancies had accepted her offers of help and changed their minds.
“Four times, I went and stood near the closed abortion center and silently prayed there. 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,” Vaughan-Spruce said in an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Authorities then held Vaughan-Spruce and interrogated her about her silent prayer. She was later released on bail and is scheduled to appear before authorities in February on four counts of protesting and engaging in an act intimidating of service users.
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Vaughan-Spruce said the idea of arresting somebody over what they are thinking, not visibly doing, is surreal. Some of her supporters have invoked the obvious comparison to George Orwell and his novel, “1984.”
Orwell’s thought police are no longer fictional characters in a novel. In the U.K., they are real. They are growing in number, and they have allies in the U.S. who would love to adopt the U.K. tactic to suppress religious belief.
“In September this year, the local council in Birmingham brought in this censorship zone, this PSPO — formerly these were used for dog fouling and drunken behavior and things like that,” Vaughan-Spruce told Carlson. “But they’re now popping up around the country surrounding abortion centers, and they banned behavior like protesting, but it also names prayer and counseling as forms of protesting.”
Peaceful, silent protesting is now illegal in the U.K.? Are British citizens — heirs of the Magna Carta, which contains two provisions guaranteeing freedom of the church from government authority — turning their backs on tradition to tolerate this kind of abuse? Some are.
Self-proclaimed atheist and retiree Nadine Billingham said the PSPOs were needed as the space around abortion clinics has become “unsafe for women,” according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
Billingham tweeted: “The area around abortion clinics has become very unsafe for women attending the clinics. Making these areas protected public spaces has sadly become necessary due to the violence/harassment perpetrated by a few loonies. It must include everyone, even those praying silently.”
I fail to see how silent prayer can be characterized as violent harassment. It sounds more like a microaggression on a subatomic scale. It shouldn’t even be on the radar of law enforcement or anybody else — except the promoters of the culture of death.
Twitter user Hartushare jumped on board to criticize Vaughan-Spruce: “It’s so obvious she’s martyring herself in the glare of the public as a way of publicizing her beliefs, she knowingly went into that area to get arrested.”
Silent publicization? Not a very good marketing tactic.
Not everyone was so quick to condemn a woman who silently prays for life outside abortion clinics. People on both sides of the abortion debate have come to Vaughan-Spruce’s aid, as reported by Fox. Even abortion rights advocates have concerns about the protest law.
“That in itself is very encouraging to hear,” Vaughan-Spruce told Carlson, “that it’s not necessarily about people who support abortion or don’t support abortion. This is more to do with freedom of thought here. It’s even gone further than freedom of prayer. I mean, we all talk about the cancel culture and the concerns we have about people being canceled [for] speaking in public.”
The culture of death may have taken over much of the legal system and the mainstream press in the U.K. and abroad, but they still haven’t been able overcome the need for freedom written by God on the human heart.
Let the Vaughan-Spruce incident be a lesson and a warning to all people of faith. There are many out there who hate God and would crucify Jesus again, if only they could. But they can’t. So they have set their sights upon Christians.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
