Politicians and journalists cannot resist misrepresenting prayer vigils when it suits their pro-abortion agenda, as was proved recently after a peaceful gathering outside a Finsbury Park abortion clinic.

On Saturday 8 February, supporters of the anti-abortion group Helpers of God’s Precious Infants (HGPI) gathered peacefully in prayer outside an abortion clinic in Finsbury Park. Soon afterwards, MPs and newspapers misrepresented the event as being in some way “aggressive” and even “violent”.

The editor of the Ham & High, André Langlois, for example, who endorses the introduction of “exclusion zones” in the vicinity of abortion clinics, accused the peaceful gathering of engaging in “emotional violence” towards those entering and exiting the clinic.

Note that extraordinary phrase.

The description of peaceful prayer vigils constituting “emotional violence” marks a disingenuous and illiberal attempt to silence legitimate Christian petition where it is needed the most. However, such gatherings have regularly been misrepresented in the media and in parliament as a type of “harassment”.

This could not be further from the case, as Sajid Javid, the former Home Secretary, concluded in 2018.

The truth about prayer vigils

The Home Office review, commissioned to assess whether there was a need to introduce “buffer zones” around abortion clinics, concluded in 2018 that “aggressive activities” were “not the norm”. Home Secretary Sajid Javid wrote in response to the findings that “introducing national buffer zones would not be a proportionate response”, as SPUC also reported.

Antonia Tully, SPUC Director of Campaigns, commented at the time that the Home Office report was “a massive victory for common sense, democracy and above all for the hundreds of vulnerable women who are saved from the horror of abortion at the very gates of the abortion clinic”.

Of course, I support Javid’s affirmation of Britain’s “long-standing tradition” of free speech, allowing citizens to “gather together and to demonstrate their views”. Still, it is a sad fact about modern Britain, as well as the rest of the Western world, that the hard-won freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly are now under constant attack, most especially by the debasement of the language – through such post-modern constructions as “emotional violence”.

The Finsbury Park vigil was itself peaceable and lawful. Members of the HGPI delivered leaflets to passers-by and told women entering the clinic that they “loved them”. If this constitutes “violence”, then Valentine’s Day ought to be relabelled an international day of hate; protestations of love should be banned, and the offending individuals thrown in jail.

Of course, such words were not, as they were reported to be, “intimidatory tactics”. Moreover, three police officers were present at the vigil, and as a spokesperson for the HGPI pointed out:

“If the Helpers were doing anything criminal, the police would have taken action. As it was, the police saw no reason to move from where they were standing, from the start to the finish of our time there.”

It should be noted that the police already have powers to restrict public “protests” deemed harmful. These measures include the Public Order Act 1986 and the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Had those present outside of the Finsbury Park clinic engaged in “harassment or degradation”, as has been suggested, the police would have intervened.

The HGPI spokesperson added that “trained pavement counsellors offered help to those coming to the clinic and they offered information to people passing by, who expressed interest in what we were doing”.

The continuing effort to misrepresent and ban peaceful vigils  

On 13 February, Catherine West, Labour MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, slammed the Finsbury Park vigil in the House of Commons. Falsifying the event that took place in her constituency, Mrs West described the “protestors” as “intent on disrupting the clinic’s work and intimidating service users who were attending it”. The MP for Hornsey and Wood Green requested that laws “be updated to protect women who choose to exercise their right to access pregnancy advice services” and “provide for buffer zones around registered clinics”.

Similarly, Labour MP David Lammy, Twitter-complainer-in-chief, gave another false account of the “beyond the pale” prayer vigil when he likened it to “US style bully boy tactics”. Both Mrs West’s and Mr Lammy’s comments are part of the broader vilification of anti-abortion advocates who attend such vigils.

There is no mention of the violence that has, on occasion, been done to supporters at prayer vigils, which SPUC has highlighted.

We should also pay special attention to the language employed by media sources, pro-abortion advocates and some MPs supporting the introduction of buffer zones. Mr Langlois, for example, who employs the highly questionable term “emotional violence” to describe a prayer vigil, has turned a 2,000-year-old Christian invocation into a supposedly “violent” act.

George Orwell warned us against such “political language” that is “designed to make lies sound truthful” and “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And it is vital that the anti-abortion movement calls out such misrepresentations as has happened, in this instance, with the prayer vigil at Finsbury Park.

The conflation of “prayer” and “violence” will ultimately be used to shut vigils down.

Words such as “harassment”, “degradation”, “nasty” and “intimidatory”, employed by Mrs West on 13 February in the House of Commons, are a disservice, not only to those present at the vigil, but to the English language and our democracy as a whole.