You know the feeling: you’re feeling sociable, why wouldn’t you make a sign saying “Here to talk, if you want to”, and head for a spot outside the nearest abortion clinic? And why wouldn’t some of its arriving patients want to pause before their appointments and satisfy your entirely innocent interest in their reproductive intentions?
This, give or take, amounted to the case by the prominent anti-abortion campaigner, Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was on Friday found guilty of twice breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). Her sign-holding outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic was, she had argued, not covered by a council-imposed safe zone, being “a mere invitation to speak”. And thus an invitation she could have happily extended to strangers just a little further from the clinic. But that did not suit Tossici-Bolt’s purpose. Nor does anything prevent her from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere except right in abortion patients’ faces outside clinics. These details, although similar regulations exist in parts of the US, routinely fail to surface in accounts by her prominent US supporters, with whose help Tossici-Bolt has been misrepresenting the illegal undermining of UK women’s reproductive rights as a noble quest for free speech.
Joining with JD Vance, and US anti-abortion pressure group Alliance Defending Freedom (whose UK arm supported her legal defence), a bureau within the US State Department generously took time away from domestic free speech crises to send a delegation to meet Tossici-Bolt. It then tweeted what was generally understood as menacing, that it was “monitoring” her case. “It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression.” A similar admonition, tagging those twin objects of Trump’s esteem, Putin and Viktor Orbán, is expected any time.
Would the State Department also be “monitoring” the protection from harassment of women seeking medical treatment, which is the right the UK government was finally, after increasing harassment outside abortion clinics, compelled to balance with anti-abortion campaigners’ freedom to distress them? On the contrary. Pre-tariffs, the Telegraph attributed to some unnamed US imperialist the threatening statement “no free trade without free speech”, as if, such is current US hubris, British women can no longer expect their reproductive choices to escape Trump’s patriarchal reach. After Tossici-Bolt, the addition of an abortion multiplier to the existing tariff formula cannot be ruled out.
Nor, now a British district judge, Orla Austin, has brazenly put domestic law before clear US instructions, can the bombing of, if not all of Dorset, at least Poole’s unruly magistrates court. She found Tossici-Bolt had breached a buffer zone, and was ordered to pay £20,026 in costs with a two-year conditional discharge. Generously, you might think, Austin said Tossici-Bolt “lacked insight” into the impact of her actions. If so, the activist, who leads a local branch of 40 Days for Life, appears to have learned little from her years of protests, which include a failed legal challenge to the Bournemouth buffer zone and a submission against legal abortion in Northern Ireland.
That general restrictions outside abortion clinics have, after years of disruption, finally been imposed is, of course, purely because of the distress increasingly inflicted on their clients by anti-abortion activists. In the absence of safe zones, patients have been tormented with anything from abuse, spitting and challenges, to foetus pictures and activists striking attitudes indicating “silent prayer”.
You might think, from outside the clinic-harassing community, that prayer location means little to an all-seeing God, but with a What3Words precision that might, if only theologians would investigate, account for unsatisfactory responses over thousands of years, experienced anti-abortion nuisances insist that these communications be transmitted on site. Maybe the signal is better there. Though in the case of the Bournemouth-based anti-abortion campaigner, Adam Smith-Connor, it was more convenience that dictated silent prayer outside a clinic (the one also haunted by Tossici-Bolt) quite unrelated to the northern provider where he regretted an abortion of 24 years ago. “It is not practical for me to go to Leeds,” he told a court in 2022, “so I go to a more local location to pray because my son lost his life within an abortion facility.” He received a two-year conditional discharge for breaching the PSPO with an order to pay £9,000 in costs.
In this way, Smith-Connor has also converted himself, as is evidently the way forward for anti-abortion campaigners in predominantly abortion-tolerant societies, into the more promising role of brutally censored dissident, Bournemouth’s answer to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Thank you VP Vance for defending western values & freedom. I salute you sir”, Smith-Connor tweeted after Vance had surprised his audience at the Munich Security Conference with a speech that seemed better calculated to please anti-abortion fanatics. Maybe the ADF got one about the defence legacy of the cold war?
By way of illustrating free speech in peril, Vance selected first, as the most shocking censorship, the fining of Bournemouth man Smith-Connor for breaching buffer zone regulations. Second, lurching into fiction, he claimed Scottish residents in buffer zones had received letters warning that “even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law”.
Not satisfied with this, Vance continued: “Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.” Eh? You gathered that even if lying is wrong, it’s less wrong than missing the chance, as in this speech, to urge foreign opponents of abortion, by reinventing the intimidation of women as freedom, to go for a US-style assault on reproductive rights.
And sure enough, St Livia of the harmless placards has called her conviction a “dark day for freedom”. And to the extent that it provokes the White House into further meddling with British women’s rights, she might, appallingly, be right.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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