Are pro-life vigil attendees extremists?

According to media portrayals, pro-life men and women who attend prayer vigils outside abortion facilities are religious lunatics, a quaint hangover from the Middle Ages when burnings at the stake were considered light entertainment – a twelfth-century Netflix minus the subscription fee.

But a line of quiet people shivering on the street seems a very measured sort of fundamentalism.

Before the media and abortion apologists start throwing around the “extremist” label, they ought to look at themselves first. An ideology that kills thousands of unborn children a year in the UK, even when the baby is viable and can feel pain, and which wants to arrest and even jail those who stand against this outside the killing ground, an ideology like this seems more extreme and harmful than the love that motivates peaceful pro-life witness, founded most of all on love.  

Do pro-life vigils cause harassment and intimidation?

In an age when words are said to constitute violence, it’s not so surprising that prayer is now considered harassment. Indeed, several pro-lifers have already been arrested and charged for praying silently outside abortion facilities. Again, abortion ideologues would have us believe that making the sign of the cross is more extreme than arresting a man or woman for doing just that, which has happened in Britain more than once in recent months.  

A Home Office review, commissioned to assess if “buffer zones” around abortion facilities were necessary, concluded in 2018 that “aggressive activities” were “not the norm”. Sajid Javid, who was Home Secretary then, stated that “buffer zones would not be a proportionate response”.

Unable to find real cases of harassment, pro-abortion apologists were forced to make them up. For example, in 2020, a prayer vigil outside an abortion facility in Finsbury Park in London was portrayed by the media as a violent event. The nature of the violence? A peaceful gathering of prayerful pro-lifers. This was “emotional violence”, wrote the editor of the newspaper Ham & High, and it surely justified the imposition of an “exclusion zone” to protect women from prayer.

In other words, the demand for actual examples of violent behavior and harassment vastly outstrips the supply, forcing pro-abortion activists to redefine prayer and Bible verses as violent acts. This isn’t so much a sleight of hand as it is a defilement of the English language and reality.

Do pro-life vigil attendees hate women?

The notion that prayer vigil participants (many of them women) go out of their way to hate on women by standing in the cold for hours on end is an odd assertion, though charges of misogyny seem to be the go-to response today from people who prefer to libel their opponents rather than engage with them honestly in debate; in the end, they cheapen real-world examples of hate for women.

The reality is that pro-lifers want to help desperate women in crisis pregnancies by giving them a way out of abortion. For many women, abortion is not a choice but a decision that is forced on them by circumstances, such as lack of finances or a coercive partner, family member or boss. Far from standing in judgement of such neglected women, pro-lifers stand up for them when others refuse to. The abortion industry thrives on fear, whereas pro-lifers seek to offer last-minute interventions of love for women desperate to keep their unborn child.

As Andrew Boff of the London Assembly states, pro-lifers at vigils “are coming from a position of love, of love for human life…

“To ban people from showing an alternate way, when the worst possible outcome of their activity might be that a child lives that otherwise would not live, I think is outrageous, quite frankly.”

Is banning pro-life vigils a progressive act?

Banning vigils not only cancels the free speech of pro-lifers, but it also violates women’s right to hear what they have to say and offer. Far from being a progressive act, buffer zones impose what George Orwell described in the novel 1984 as “an endless present in which the Party is always right”.

Having fought hard for centuries to establish and protect the right to free speech, assembly and religious expression in the UK, we now risk regressing to a time when only certain views were permitted by the state.

At the time of writing, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Adam Smith-Connor, awaits trial for the “thoughtcrime” of praying silently outside an abortion facility for his dead son who was lost to abortion. “I did not approach anyone, I did not speak to anyone, I did not breach anyone’s privacy. I simply stood silently. I am being tried for the prayerful thoughts I held in my head”, said Smith-Connor.

In the effort to extinguish pro-life thought and expression from the public space, pro-abortion ideologues ignore or don’t care about the consequences of buffer zones – they might even welcome the opportunity to forbid opinions they disagree with, not only on abortion but potentially other views as well.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it", says the famous phrase misattributed to Voltaire. Buffer zones pose an existential threat to this philosophy that underpins our fundamental freedoms in the West. We neglect it at our peril.

Are pro-life vigils in the UK imported from America?

The media portrays UK pro-life vigils as an American export even worse than the Kardashians, processed cheese and punctuating every third word in a sentence with the word “like”.  There’s also the curious assumption, which verges on conspiracy theory, that every vigil and almost any form of pro-life public activity is necessarily US-funded and just downright awful. According to the likes of the Guardian and the Economist, behind every Catholic woman holding up a Bible verse is an Illuminati-like organisation bent on making women’s lives worse by encouraging them to be mothers.

40 Days for Life, which organises worldwide vigils, appears to attract the most ire from pro-abortion ideologues, if only because it’s from Texas, like crude oil and Billie Nelson. But really, the assumption that pro-life vigils are bad because they are perceived to be “foreign” seems a tad parochial – the Guardian will have a field day when it finds out that the Roman Catholic Church is based in Rome. 

The truth is that many pro-life individuals, spurred on by religious or personal conviction, attend such vigils because they want to make a difference and witness to the truth. This isn’t an American but a universal compunction, an indispensable aspect of the human spirit that sees everyday people gather as they always have done in support of a worthy cause.