GB News presenter Nana Akua said on air that a pro-life vigil helped her not to abort her child, “and I’m glad that I was influenced by that”.
Miss Akua, 53, made the admission after pro-life activist Livia Tossici-Bolt, 64, was found guilty and sentenced for offering conversation to women outside an abortion facility in Bournemouth.
Speaking about the activity of such pro-life vigils, Ms Akua said: “It helped me because I didn’t have the abortion I was going to have because somebody was out there. But I don’t think that was bad. They weren’t in my face, and I’m glad that I was influenced by that.”
In a Daily Mail article in 2023, Ms Akua said she “had contemplated a termination” when she was pregnant with her son. While she welcomed having a sibling for her young daughter, her relationship with her partner was turbulent and she wasn’t sure she could go through with it.
Ms Akua went to an abortion facility three times, but “each time, to walk away again, the feeling of my unborn child kicking inside me preventing me going through with it.
“On the third occasion, greeted by a placard depicting a foetus at the same gestation as my own growing baby held by pro-life campaigners, something inside me shifted: here was undeniably a living being, and I resolved then and there to have this baby come what may.”
Last Friday, 4 April, Ms Tossici-Bolt, 64, was found guilty of breaching a buffer zone in Bournemouth. She had stood near an abortion facility and held a sign that read, “Here to talk, if you want to.” Ms Tossici-Bolt was given a two-year conditional discharge and a £20,000 fine.
President Donald Trump’s US State Department has been “monitoring” Ms Tossici-Bolt’s case and stated that “we are concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom”.
Last year, a Scottish committee hearing into buffer zones heard from Alina Dulgheriu whose daughter is alive today because of a pro-life vigil outside an abortion facility.
“The day that I turned up to my abortion appointment, a volunteer outside the clinic gently gave me a leaflet… I felt it provided me with exactly what I was longing for”, she explained.
“Some would say I already [chose] abortion, but the truth is I didn’t choose it. The pro-life vigil gave me the hope I was searching for had I not received the support from volunteers, my beautiful daughter would not have been here today.”
In 2020, Andrew Boff, a Conservative Member of the London Assembly, defended pro-life vigils, stating on BBC Politics London that “they are coming from a position of love, of love for human life… What these protesters are doing is showing that there is an alternative…
“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.”
Last year, buffer zones of 150m around abortion facilities were imposed across England and Wales, and 200m in Scotland. A similar law is in force in Northern Ireland.
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