Editorial: Appalling free speech limits on pro life activists
News Letter editorial on Saturday April 5 2025
On page 13 in today’s print edition we publish the shocking case of pro life campaigner Livia Tossici-Bolt. – See link below
The 64-year-old woman from Bournemouth held a sign near to an abortion clinic saying: ‘Here to talk, if you want.’
What a thoughtful way of silently offering help to women who might be having second thoughts about a termination.
But she did this within a zone in which protests are not permitted. The rights of women attending an abortion clinic are found to outweigh those of people who want to protest against the killing of an emerging human life, or even those who engage in no protest, but merely want to outline an alternative option.
It is fair to keep protestors or other pro life campaigners at some distance from women who have made the decision to enter a property for a termination – perhaps 10 metres or so. But these restriction zones extend to at least 100 metres or maybe more.
It is particularly outrageous to see these swingeing no-protest areas in Northern Ireland, which recently had the tightest anti abortion laws in Europe. Now we have not only flipped over to abortion on demand in the first trimester of a pregnancy, public expressions of opposition to that are as restrictive as in other parts of the UK.
And this is happening when America, for example, is responding the advances in technology that make it harder for us to deny the horror that is involved in aborting a foetus. The US has allowed individual states to introduce strict limits on abortion, and this has been happening at the same time that a Tory government helped railroad through abortion in NI.
And then, making this grisly saga even worse, it is the United States that is monitoring these appalling infringements on free speech in the UK that, in the case of Ms Tossici-Bolt has led to a brutally excessive £20,000 bill.