The Free Press
Rose Docherty, a 74-year-old grandmother, was put in handcuffs and arrested in Scotland last month.
Her crime?
Standing outside a Glasgow hospital where abortions are performed and holding up a sign that said: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”
Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, which Docherty stood next to, is located within a “Safe Access Zone” where exerting any “influence” over those seeking or providing abortions is banned. Praying silently—or even parking a car with a pro-life bumper sticker on it—inside the zone may violate this rule.
“I was approaching no one on that day. I wasn’t calling out. I was standing quietly by the roadside,” Docherty told The Free Press. “I am worried about a society that’s willing to lock up a 74-year-old grandmother for offering consensual conversation.”
She’s not the only one who is worried. Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance made the same point when he criticized European leaders for turning their backs on free speech.
“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said in an address at the Munich Security Conference on February 14. “Perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.”
That speech sparked immediate outrage. German defense minister Boris Pistorius said Vance’s comments were “not acceptable." The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said Vance was “trying to pick a fight.” Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, added his voice to the chorus, calling Vance “just wrong.” Last week at the White House, British prime minister Keir Starmer also hit back at Vance, insisting: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time.”
But as readers of The Free Press know, Vance is right. Free speech is most definitely on the wane in Europe, especially in the UK. And the case of Rose Docherty, who was arrested on February 19, just five days after Vance gave his Munich speech, is not the only example of the problem. As I reported for The Free Press last October, at least half a dozen people have been arrested and in some cases prosecuted over the last few years for silently protesting or praying in abortion buffer zones across England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
Docherty, who is Catholic, said she stood at the main road near the hospital and displayed her sign for about 90 minutes during lunchtime before two police officers showed up. When they asked her if she knew she was in a buffer zone, she said yes but that she was only inviting “consensual conversation.” After that, she was handcuffed, told she was being charged with breaching the abortion “safe access” law, and hauled off to the police station. There, she was searched, swabbed for DNA, and had her mugshot and fingerprints taken before being released.
She said she is now waiting to hear if there’s enough evidence to prosecute her. If convicted, she could face a fine of up to £10,000 ($12,706).
“It was a surreal experience,” Docherty told me. “I just thought, I’m a 74-year-old elderly woman—what are you afraid of that you feel that you want to handcuff me?”
Indeed, what is Britain afraid of? My once liberal homeland has allowed Orwell-style rules to infiltrate every sector of society—leading to arrests at soccer games, in the public square, and even at people’s own doorsteps.
Take these recent examples:
In January 2022, the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales decreed that using the term “Chelsea rent boys”—as a taunt against fans of the West London soccer club—counts as a homophobic slur, and that anyone using it can be prosecuted for committing a hate crime. This led to one man in his 20s, who has not been identified, getting busted after shouting: “Oi, you Chelsea rent boys” at opposing fans at a game. He pleaded guilty and was banned from attending soccer matches in the UK for three years. But perhaps the most chilling part of this story is that the young man has been reeducated by an anti-discrimination charity for offenders, called Kick It Out. The man told the BBC that he accepts what he did “was awful” and “I’ve had a look at myself. . . I’m willing to make amends.” His big lesson, he said, was that you should “think before you speak.”
Last month, British authorities arrested two men for burning the Quran in public. On February 13, a 50-year-old set fire to the holy book outside the Turkish consulate in central London because, he said, he was protesting Turkey’s president who had turned the country into a “base for radical Islamists.” Nevertheless, the man was charged with intent to cause “harassment, alarm, or distress.” In a separate incident in Manchester, on February 1, a 47-year-old man burned a Quran near a memorial to Brits murdered in a 2017 Islamist terror attack. He said he did it in solidarity with a Swedish anti-Islam activist who was murdered for doing the same. Afterward, he was charged with “causing racially and religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm, or distress.” If convicted, a British legal expert told me that each man could face up to two years in prison.
And last November, police visited Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson at her home near London and told her she had been accused of a “non-crime hate incident” for a tweet she had posted one year earlier. When she asked what the offending tweet was, the police said they weren’t allowed to tell her. (Later, The Guardian reported that the tweet, which Pearson deleted shortly after posting, was a photo of police next to Pakistani political party members, with the caption: “Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”) Last week, Pearson announced she’s taking legal action against Essex Police to prevent others from being intimidated. The Free Speech Union, a nonpartisan group that helps people who fall afoul of Britain’s censorship laws, estimates that police record 65 non-crime hate incidents a day.
Before the abortion buffer zone law came into effect last September, Docherty said she used to take part in the annual 40 Days for Life campaign, which organizes prayer vigils near abortion facilities in Scotland. She said she also prayed every Tuesday with a handful of friends near the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
“It’s an important part of taking part in a vigil that people just stand quietly to let people know they’re there,” she said. “And if people want to come and speak or to have a conversation, they are free to do so.”
She said she stopped the practice after the buffer zone law was passed. But then, last month, she said she entered the zone “just as an individual, just offering to talk to anyone if they wanted to come and speak with me.”
Docherty said police had reassured the public that “the presence of those holding pro-life views was not in itself an offense.” And given her sign “made no reference to abortion, simply affirmed the fact that coercion is a crime under the Scottish law, and invited only a consensual conversation from anyone who wished to have one with me, I did not think I should be arrested.”
She said that over the past 10 years, she has been approached by various men and women who have been affected by abortion “to speak about their experience and the grief they have suffered.”
Docherty said she remembers a few years ago in Glasgow, one woman thanking vigil attendees because “she had been helped by pro-lifers in the past when she found herself with an unplanned pregnancy as a young woman.”
“Her parents said that they wanted her to abort the baby and if she didn’t, they were going to put her out of the house. She would have nowhere to live. She came to the pro-life organization, and she was supported with accommodation and supported through the pregnancy.”
In his Munich speech, Vice President Vance spoke at length about the abortion buffer zones in the UK—and singled out Adam Smith-Connor, an English veteran prosecuted for silently praying near an abortion clinic, who was featured in my story for The Free Press.
Many of Vance’s critics were hung up on his characterization of a letter that was sent to people who lived within Scotland’s censorship zones, warning them “that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”
The BBC, which is taxpayer funded, reported that Vance had described the bill “incorrectly” and that the Scottish government said that “no letters had been sent out saying people couldn’t pray in their homes.” The Times of Scotland ran a “news” article titled “Why JD Vance Is Wrong About Scotland’s Abortion Zones.” And Gillian Mackay, the Scottish politician who wrote the law, said the vice president’s claims were “nonsense” and “shameless misinformation,” while her party, the Scottish Greens, demanded he apologize. Yet the following week, when pressed for more details by a BBC journalist, Mackay admitted that praying at home could be an offense “depending on who’s passing the window.”
I wanted further clarity on the law, so I emailed the Scottish government and asked whether the following actions performed in a buffer zone would be considered illegal under the act:
Praying in private residences by a window with hands clasped.
Praying out loud in private residences about abortion.
Expressing views on abortion within private residences.
Praying with rosary beads while walking in one’s neighborhood.
Wearing any clothes that bear pro-life slogans while inside a private residence and standing by a window.
Wearing any clothes that bear pro-life slogans while walking or jogging around one’s neighborhood, taking out the garbage, or going to and from one’s car.
Carrying anti-abortion signs and banners from one’s front door to one’s car.
A spokesperson for the Scottish government, responding to my questions, said that “whether an offense has been committed will be for enforcement agencies to decide and will always depend on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
But with language that leaves so much open to interpretation, the law could easily be abused, experts told me.
“This law has perpetuated confusion,” said Jeremiah Igunnubole, a lawyer with conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which has represented five people prosecuted under UK buffer zone laws. “It is unclear.”
“A particularly zealous prosecutor” could argue these scenarios are illegal under the “influence or harassment, alarm, and distress provision,” he continued. “Such interpretations of the law amount to a root and branch removal of the right to freedom of expression enshrined under the European Convention on Human Rights.”
The effect, he concluded, is that “pro-life people, or those who agree with the pro-life message, no longer feel free to bring their full selves into the public square.”
Toby Young, founder of the Free Speech Union, agrees with that assessment.
“People will err on the side of caution, not knowing quite where the line is,” Young told me. “And it isn’t just ordinary people who don’t know. The police often don’t know, and juries themselves don’t know. It’s always a very blurry line, and that is partly because it depends upon the subjective feelings of the people identified as victims.”
Young said the United States is fortunate that none of these UK laws would survive a First Amendment challenge.
“The founders of the American Constitution and the guardians of the Constitution, in particular the Supreme Court, have been much, much more effective about defending our English common law rights than we have.”
Now, Docherty said she is in contact with lawyers and weighing up her options. “I will always fully defend my actions,” she told me, “because I know that offering a conversation is not a crime.”
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