Rachael Clarke remembers life before buffer zones. Almost every day, the head of staff at the UK’s biggest abortion provider would get emails from staff worried about protesters outside clinics – and women crying in the waiting room.
Some of the protesters had huge placards with graphic images of foetuses. Others held candlelit vigils and said prayers. One scattered baby clothes in the bushes. “We had everything from people telling women that having an abortion was putting their baby in a meat grinder to people following nurses down the road in the dark telling them they were killing babies,” says Clarke.
Since buffer zones were rolled out nationally late last year – building on public space protection orders that were already in place outside some clinics – she says things have drastically improved.
Reports of alleged harassment outside British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinics have stopped almost completely. So when she heard JD Vance, the US vice-president, decrying buffer zone laws as an attack on the “liberties of religious Britons” in a speech on Friday at the Munich Security Conference – and condemning the conviction of a man, Adam Smith-Connor, who he said had been targeted for “just silently praying on his own” – she wasn’t impressed. “You can’t see these things in isolation,” she says.
Rather than being a one-off, Clarke sees the Smith-Connor case as part of a wider effort by anti-abortion campaigners to test the new law to the limits – and shift the focus away from the true reason for buffer zones to a debate about freedom of speech.
Hers is a view shared by reproductive healthcare professionals, legal experts and campaigners who believe buffer zones – intended to protect service users and staff – are being targeted in an orchestrated campaign by conservative Christian groups that are fuelling the spread of misinformation and seeking to shift the terms of the debate.
At the centre of the efforts is the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a prominent conservative Christian group which opposes gay marriage as well as wanting abortion to be banned – and has been labelled an extreme rightwing “hate group” by critics including the Southern Poverty Law Center in the US.
The Observer has found that the group’s UK branch has coordinated publicity and funded legal costs in a string of cases of alleged abortion buffer zone breaches. In that of Smith-Connor, who was convicted in October, it has written blog posts, launched a fundraising campaign and is paying for a legal appeal.
Using almost identical language to that used by Vance, it has circulated statements claiming Smith-Connor is the victim of a “thought crime”. In reality, he had been prosecuted for breaching a public space protection order which had been put in place to protect staff and service users following issues with protests. The new buffer zone law that Vance referred to, which has since come into force, makes it illegal under the Public Order Act 2023 for anyone to do anything that intentionally or recklessly influences someone’s decision to use abortion services, obstructs them, or causes harassment or distress, within 150 metres of a clinic. The law doesn’t explicitly mention prayer, or silent prayer, but criminalises behaviour likely to intimidate staff or service users.
At the time of his arrest in November 2022, Smith-Connor had been partially standing behind a tree near an abortion clinic in Bournemouth, which was protected by a public space protection order following anti-abortion activity. He had been praying, which he said was because he and his former girlfriend had once aborted a pregnancy. But he had also been asked repeatedly to move on, by a community officer who had spoken to him for an hour and 40 minutes. Ordering him to pay £9,000 costs, district judge Orla Austin said he had breached a public space protection order and that his actions had been “deliberate”.
After Vance’s comments on Friday, the ADF celebrated online. CEO and president Kristen Waggoner – who was in Europe this week in a visit that coincided with Vance’s – posted on X: “Very grateful to Vice President @JDVance for highlighting Adam’s unjust and illiberal conviction for silent prayer in the UK.”
The ADF is also funding legal help for Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the founder of the March for Life anti-abortion group, who has been arrested twice, but not convicted over alleged buffer zone violations, and was paid £13,000 by West Midlands police.
A prosecutor had said the case had not met the full code test, which assesses whether prosecutions are in the public interest and if there is sufficient evidence. A West Midlands spokesperson said Vaughan-Spruce had made a civil claim for unlawful arrest, assault and a breach of human rights and it had settled the claim without any admission of liability.
This weekend, the ADF was sharing videos of Vaughan-Spruce outside an abortion clinic, being asked to move on by an officer and declining.
The ADF also backed Father Sean Gough, a Catholic priest who faced charges claiming he intimidated service users near an abortion clinic, which were later dropped for the same reason as Vaughan-Spruce’s - and is supporting a fourth woman who is expected to appear in court next month over her alleged failure to pay a fixed penalty notice after she was accused of breaching a buffer zone.
The cases raise questions about the growing influence of US anti-abortion groups in Britain. The Observer previously reported that the UK branch of the ADF had more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.
In all the cases, at the centre of the ADF’s publicity is the idea that silent prayer is being criminalised – and people’s right to freedom of religion is being eroded.
But Clarke says this is a distraction. “The thing they try to push is that it’s just ‘silently praying’: you might be walking down the road minding your business and a police officer leaps out. But that’s not how it works. These campaigners seek out abortion clinics and they stand directly outside,” she says.
Pam Lowe, senior sociology lecturer at Aston University, who has researched the anti-abortion movement, said: “From my research the intimidation comes from people standing there. Most people are not immersed in what is or isn’t happening outside abortion clinics. So all they see is someone they think is going to stop them. It doesn’t matter what that person intends or doesn’t intend to do, it’s the presence rather than the action that’s the problem. I’ve seen people climb over walls, put their hood up or try to run past these people, because they don’t know and have no idea what their intentions are.”
She said the attempt to focus on “silent prayer” and freedom of speech and religion appeared to be a “deliberate strategy by the anti-abortion movement”. “They are still free to pray and say what they want about abortion. They are just asking them to move 100m down the street.”
The ADF says it wants buffer zones to be abolished altogether. Lois McLatchie Miller, the ADF’s UK spokesperson, said they did “not exist to protect women from harassment (as this, rightfully, was already illegal). Rather, they violate fundamental freedoms by criminalising people for peaceful, consensual conversations, and even prayers”.
The group says it’s proud to back the legal defences of Smith–Connor, Vaughan-Spruce and others it says have been “targeted for their Christian faith”. It denies it is a hate group – a claim it says is part of a “smear campaign” – and says Smith-Connor’s prosecution is “one of the most extreme examples of censorship in a free society”. “The UK is on show to the world for “thought policing,” which is incompatible with democracy,” Miller said.
But from a legal standpoint, academics say the current law is robust – and strikes the delicate balance between the rights of campaigners, and the rights of the people it is intended to protect.
Prof George Letsas, from the faculty of law at UCL, said the buffer zones law – which came into effect in England and Wales in October - was already “very clear” – and effectively balanced the human rights of all parties. “From a legal perspective it’s clear that the right of women to access abortion services prevails over the right to protest, including silent protest,” he said.
He feels efforts by campaign groups to influence UK legal processes are “very problematic”. “Because where the money spent is very substantial, and there are deep pockets, you worry about the outcomes and being one-sided. What’s better is if these cases come to the courts more organically as opposed to in an orchestrated way where they’re trying to test the limits of the law. The problem is these appear to be orchestrated, deliberate efforts.”
Emily Ottley, lecturer in the law department at the University of Winchester, said challenges to arrests and convictions were to be expected, given the buffer zones law is new and has not been tested. “It’s important to not completely eradicate the views and feelings of the people who are protesting,” she said. But she said the law had been formulated in a way that balanced the human rights of both parties - adding that the true test would be in how it was treated by police, prosecutors and the courts in months to come.
For Dr Jonathan Lord, the medical director at MSI Reproductive Choices and co-chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists abortion taskforce, the ADF funding of legal cases shows how “the radical American right wing” had been “empowered” and was attempting to push its “extreme anti-abortion views in the UK and around the world”.
He said he hoped the focus of the conversation would return to the true reason why the law was brought in. “For the terrified woman who knows she faces abuse if their partner discovers she is pregnant, it is irrelevant whether the protester is praying, thinking about their shopping list or has an empty mind. It is simply that they are there that is the problem,” he said. “It has nothing to do with freedom of speech or of banning prayer, but of preventing harm to women, girls and their families.”
