All I did was pray to God - and yet I stand convicted as a criminal

The headlines described it as the first conviction of a “thoughtcrime” in the United Kingdom, after Adam Smith-Connor was found guilty and ordered to pay £9,000 costs for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Southern England.

The term was coined by George Orwell in his chilling dystopian novel ‘1984’, where a powerful, oppressive communist state violently polices the thoughts of its citizens to ensure they comply with approved opinion and do not criticise the regime.

Many say that this nightmarish vision has become a reality in the United Kingdom because individuals have been asked if they are praying in their head and arrested or fined as a result.

“Today, the court has decided that certain thoughts – silent thoughts – can be illegal in the United Kingdom,” said Smith-Connor, a former army reservist, in a statement. “That cannot be right. All I did was pray to God, in the privacy of my own mind – and yet I stand convicted as a criminal?

“It troubles me greatly to see our freedoms eroded to the extent that thoughtcrimes are now being prosecuted in the UK.”

In this case “Public Service Protection Orders” were used to prevent prayer. They were introduced in 2014 for local authorities to deal with anti-social behaviour. They have been used in Ealing and more recently in the Bournemouth region to restrict pro-life prayer vigils outside abortion clinics. In Smith-Connor’s case, the PSPO imposed by Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council cites prayer as a banned activity, and the magistrate judged that because he was stood with his head bowed and his hands clasped, it was clear that he was praying, although it was silent. Isabel Vaughn-Spruce, another long-standing anti-abortion activist, has also been arrested for silent prayer – although she was recently awarded compensation for unlawful arrest as a result.

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As another pro-life campsaigner explained in a recent Premier Unbelievable debate, many people attending vigils outside abortion clinics are not protesting or harassing, but instead hoping to offer support to the woman to give them more options to keep their child. “Pro-lifers, for many years, have had a good practice of offering charitable leaflets about support services available to women who might like to consider continuing their pregnancy if they know about other options available - of economic support, of spiritual, emotional advice, etc.,” said Lois McLatchie-Miller, a communications officer for Alliance Defending Freedom, the organisation that defended Smith-Connor and Vaughn-Spruce, in the discussion.

There is even a group of mums known as “Be here for me” that oppose legal restrictions outside of clinics, because they decided to keep their babies after such an intervention, and are grateful that the pro-life activists were there to help them keep their child.

However on 31 October a new law will be enforced that further restricts activity outside abortion clinics, introducing what are known as “buffer zones”. This will explicitly “make it illegal for anyone to do anything that intentionally or recklessly influences someone’s decision to use abortion services” according to the government press release. Like the confusion over the limits of PSPOs, it is likely that the new law will have wide variations in interpretation, and could be misused.

“Obviously, harassment is wrong and is already illegal, and nobody should be supporting harassment of any woman anywhere, let alone outside a clinic,” said McLatchie-Miller in the debate: “Buffer zones: protecting privacy or preventing speech?”. “But what influence can refer to, because this wording is so broad and so vague, is that it can mean really anything that the good authorities decide it to mean.”

The opposing view from Jan Macvarish, a longstanding free speech and pro-choice advocate, was that women’s privacy needs to be protected, and that these new laws are to stop intense tactics of pro-life protests outside abortion clinics such as large pictures of dismembered babies, used to try to dissuade women from abortion. “That’s where these proposals come from,” she said. “They don’t just come from some very well meaning people just standing in ones and twos outside clinics praying. If that was all that had ever happened, I don’t think this would have come about.”

In fact MacVarish dismisses the “free speech” or “thoughtcrime” concerns as mere tactics by people trying to restrict abortion, used because moral arguments against killing babies are not succeeding to persuade the public. “I’ve been an activist all my life,” she said. “I’ve undertaken protests. I’ve been arrested for protests. I understand what tactics are. I think the ‘silent prayer motif’ is the tactic that’s being used by the pro-life movement to try to move the terrain of abort, of the abortion argument, onto a free speech terrain.”

She believes the Smith-Connor ruling is more about the location of the speech than free speech itself. “I do object to the idea that somehow this is about a banning of silent prayer, and not least because in other areas of life, I completely agree that pro-life arguments are being monstered and pro-life arguments are being chased off university campuses, which I’m very, very concerned about.”

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But the ADF’s legal counsel perceives much more significance in the restriction of prayer in the Smith-Connor case. “This is a legal turning point of immense proportions,” said Jeremiah Igunnubole. “We can hardly sink any lower in our neglect of basic fundamental freedoms of free speech and thought. We will look closely at the judgment and consider an appeal.”

The legal judgement reveals that Smith-Connor had been allowed to pray and read scripture silently in his first interaction with a police officer in 2022. He had written to the Council’s Anti-Social Behaviour Manager Julia Howlett to tell her of his intention to stand at the site and pray silently, and she had told him he could be prosecuted. When council staff attended the site and asked him what he was doing, he told them he was praying - for his son who had been aborted 22 years before – which resulted in a fixed penalty notice, which he did not pay, prompting a prosecution.

The recent judgement is based on a prior judicial review in the case “Tossici-Bolt v BCPC,” due to a legal challenge by Christian Concern of the basis of the Bournemouth PSPO, using arguments for religious freedom among others.

Peter Ould, an Anglican priest and commentator, said that there are still further ways to test the law to discover its limits and to what extent our freedoms are curtailed. “For me, it is the original judicial review that is the battleground,” he told Premier Unbelievable. “The judgement just looks to the review and applies it to Adam Smith-Connor.”

Ould believes that the next step in testing the law would be for an activist to stand silently and not to respond if asked. “This is the so called ‘silent man, saying nothing’ defence,” he said. “How do the police know that he is intentional on doing [section 4 of the PSPO which mentions prayer]?

“He has a right to silence and to not incriminate himself. He’s not causing any form of public disturbance, and more importantly, it’s impossible to prove what that person is or isn’t thinking or intending. That would test this judicial review and the limits to what can and can’t be prohibited in a PSPO.”

With the confusion over the limits of the law, and the threat of prosecution, it may be only the most committed activists will visit abortion clinics in future. But if women have no contact with anyone who disagrees with abortion or even favours other options, how can she be said to have made a genuinely informed choice?

Heather Tomlinson is a freelance Christian writer. Find more of her work at https://heathertomlinson.substack.com/ or via X (twitter) @heathertomli