Police State Cometh: In England, Woman Arrested for Silently Praying Near Abortion Clinic

From Peter Imanuelsen at The Freedom Corner with PeterSweden at Substack

 

Freedom of speech is not protected in England and is under serious assault as you can see if you listen to the video below (YouTube link is here).  Even with 1st Amendment rights here in the DU (Disunited States,) it's also under severe assault by the state. 

 

 

Here's Peter's take about the incident:

Look at that. They got three police out to arrest a lone woman who was doing nothing wrong. So brave.

It’s not like they have anything better to do, like solving real crime, right? Turns out that the numbers of recorded crime is now at an new record high, meanwhile the number of solved cases are at a new record low. And it’s really bad, with a big increase in violent crime and rapes.

Surely the police should focus on solving real crime like this instead of arresting ladies praying silently? Nope, priorities is important in a dictatorship you know!

Turns out that in Birmingham, authorities have enforced a censorship zone so they can arrest people who are ”engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval” in relation to abortion, including through “verbal or written means, prayer or counseling…”

Photo of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce

Which apparently means praying silently as well. Here is the statement on the ADF website from Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the woman who was arrested.

”It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind. Censorship zones purport to ban harassment, which is already illegal. Nobody should ever be subject to harassment. But what I did was the furthest thing from harmful – I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion, inside the privacy of my own mind. Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK”

So let me get this straight.

This woman wasn’t arrested for harassing anyone. She wasn’t arrested for protesting. She was arrested for the private thoughts inside her own mind.

Think about that for a moment. This is literal thought crime. She was arrested for her thoughts (praying). If she had been thinking about something else, she wouldn’t have been arrested. She was literally arrested for THINKING the wrong things (praying).

We are reaching levels of 1984 not previously thought possible. Yep.

She is now being charged on four counts for thinking the wrong thoughts and praying silently in her own mind.  [Doug here: I'm sure she's well enough known as an anti-abortion activist for her to be targeted. But still?? It's what happens when everything is made illegal.  What's next?  "You're looking at me funny."]

If you don’t recognize that this is a chilling attack on free speech, democracy and everything that is decent, then I don’t know what to tell you.

What’s even worse is that politicians in Britain are planning on introducing these censorship zones around all abortion facilities in England and Wales.

In a supreme court hearing in Scotland in July, the government testified that silent prayer could cause ”psychological damage”.

Even though mainstream media has largely refused to report on this shocking story, word has still gotten out and over £8000 has been raised for her legal defense.

This isn’t the first time things like this has happened in Britain. Preachers have been arrested on the streets for the crime of proclaiming the gospel, see this video I made a few years back.

Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, with hundreds of millions living under oppression, especially in Communist countries like North Korea and the Middle East.

Now we are beginning to see this happening in the West as well. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech is being taken away from us.

So please share this article everywhere you can to raise awareness!

Resist tyranny.