UK woman fights prosecution for praying outside abortion clinic

A Christian woman in the United Kingdom went to court earlier this week to challenge the prosecution she faced last fall for protesting and praying outside an abortion clinic.

Claire Brennan, 52, and her wheelchair-bound colleague David Hall were arrested last October for holding a sign and reciting The Lord’s Prayer outside Causeway Hospital in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, according to her legal counsel at the London-based Christian Legal Centre.

They appealed their arrests at the Coleraine Magistrates Court on Tuesday, their lawyers said.

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Brennan and Hall were allegedly violating the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act (Northern Ireland), a law passed last year in Northern Ireland that prohibits protests of any kind within a 100-meter radius (109 yards) of abortion clinics in the country.

The law resembles similar laws in England, Scotland and Wales, as well as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) Act in the United States that the U.S. Department of Justice has used to imprison pro-life advocates protesting outside abortion clinics.

According to footage of Brennan’s exchange with police on Oct. 3, 2023, officers confront Brennan as she’s reciting the Lord’s Prayer outside the hospital. She was also holding a rosary and a sign reading, “Pray to end abortion.”

“If you carry on protesting here, you will be arrested and you will be removed from here, and a report’s going to go on to the [Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland],” one of the officers warns.

“If you do not move from that exclusion zone, my only recourse is to arrest you and remove you from the exclusion zone,” he said.

The same officer also pushed back against her assertion that she had a moral duty to be there and called her “really stubborn and ignorant” for disobeying the law.

“The law of the land stops me from upholding the law of God. … We pray for the babies who will be imminently killed in this hospital,” Brennan reportedly said.

In a statement ahead of her court hearing, Brennan said she believes she did nothing wrong. She also lamented “the expansion of abortion services in Northern Ireland in recent years,” and expressed her belief that buffer zone laws are inherently discriminatory against Christians.

“We need urgent change to roll back what has happened in this country and to uphold God’s law not man’s law,” she said. “The unborn are the most vulnerable and at risk in our society and we have forgotten our moral duty to do everything we can to protect their lives and to provide vulnerable mothers with alternatives to abortion.”

“The legislation discriminates against Christian beliefs and their expression. If we are not free to express prayer against abortion outside of a clinic without being criminalized, then none of us are free,” she continued.

“I believe I have done absolutely nothing wrong. If the courts find that I have and decide to convict me then we are in a very dark place indeed,” she added.

Andrea Williams, who serves as chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, noted in a statement how abortion in Northern Ireland had been permitted only to save the life of the mother until 2020.

“Since that law changed in March 2020, there has been a two and a half times increase in the annual number of abortions,” said Williams. “This is a tragedy, and anyone who cares about protecting life should be especially concerned by what has happened in Northern Ireland in recent years.”

Williams believes that exclusion zones prohibiting free speech outside abortion clinics “are an oppressive part of the current culture which force consent and silence dissent.”

“The saddest thing of all is that we are actually talking about human lives,” she added.

Other Christians in the U.K. have faced similar prosecution for quiet protests outside the “exclusion zones” around abortion clinics.

Last September, the West Midlands Police dropped charges against Isabel Vaughn-Spruce and apologized for arresting her twice for praying silently outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham, England.

Last year, eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Rashad Hussain, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, expressing their concerns about the U.K.’s treatment of Christians.

The lawmakers specifically pinpointed the “Public Spaces Protection Orders” in multiple U.K. municipalities that created “buffer zones” around abortion clinics roughly the size of a football stadium, in which pro-life individuals are prohibited from offering help, praying or expressing any perceived disapproval of abortion.