British anti-abortion activist Isabel Vaughn-Spruce says she wasn't protesting when she stood silently in a protected zone outside an abortion clinic near her church in Birmingham, England.
"I internally reasoned that surely my silent thoughts should still be allowed to happen inside that zone. My prayers. So I went and silently prayed outside the abortion center, initially just when it was closed, and I was arrested because of that, twice," Vaughn-Spruce said.
U.K. law establishes protected zones around abortion clinics. They are meant to shield women seeking care from protesters. The zone boundaries are marked by signs around facilities that provide abortion services.
Abortion rights groups in the U.K. have said that silent prayer outside of abortion clinics amounts to harassment for the women seeking care.
Rachael Clarke, chief of staff of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the U.K.'s leading provider of abortion services, said that silent prayer caused "the vast majority of distress, alarm and harassment" for women entering abortion clinics.
Vaughn-Spruce said that, upon her arrest, she reached out to a legal group with American roots — Alliance Defending Freedom International — for help. In the end, she was not convicted of any offenses.
"Standing up for these issues and for freedoms, whether that's in America or any other country, essentially that's still the same. So the roots of an organization, in a way, whether it's American or English, doesn't really make any difference to me," Vaughn-Spruce said. "The work that [ADF] are doing has been absolutely tremendous."
