Rachael Clarke remembers life before buffer zones. Almost every day, the head of staff at the UK’s biggest abortion provider would get emails from staff worried about protesters outside clinics – and women crying in the waiting room.
Since buffer zones were rolled out nationally late last year – building on public space protection orders that were already in place outside some clinics – she says things have drastically improved.
Reports of alleged harassment outside British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinics have stopped almost completely. So when she heard JD Vance, the US vice-president, decrying buffer zone laws as an attack on the “liberties of religious Britons” in a speech on Friday at the Munich Security Conference – and condemning the conviction of a man, Adam Smith-Connor, who he said had been targeted for “just silently praying on his own” – she wasn’t impressed. “You can’t see these things in isolation,” she says.
Rather than being a one-off, Clarke sees the Smith-Connor case as part of a wider effort by anti-abortion campaigners to test the new law to the limits – and shift the focus away from the true reason for buffer zones to a debate about freedom of speech.
The spectacle of American political figures like JD Vance grandstanding about “religious liberties” in the UK while ignoring the calculated erosion of bodily autonomy is peak ideological export. These groups aren’t defending faith—they’re laundering oppressive rhetoric through legal theatrics, framing harassment as martyrdom. Silent prayer? A Trojan horse for normalizing obstruction. Buffer zones exist because presence itself is coercion, a fact lost in their performative victimhood.
The real story isn’t free speech—it’s foreign-funded operatives weaponizing courts to destabilize reproductive rights. Let’s not pretend this is about thought crimes. It’s about control. Always has been. When clinics become battlegrounds, democracy’s already broken.
I am an American who recently moved to the UK, and I am always waiting for some fallout to happen because of my accent- deservedly so because of things like this. I am constantly amazed when people say, “I love Americans!” Don’t, this is what we’re doing to you. I mean I’m glad I don’t get shit all the time, but maybe, even if I don’t personally deserve it, “I love Americans” is the wrong attitude at this point?
I often find those same people can follow up “I love Americans” with “I hate America” just as easily. Americans have a pretty friendly and (almost overly-)gregarious reputation, despite our govt’s best efforts to play international bad guy
Right, but Americans are coming over and doing this shit, not the government.
JD Vance isn’t part of the government? Nothing in this article is a civilian doing anything, unless you mean more than this article with “this shit” at which point I’m lost and you’ll need to expand your point for me.
As the article says, Vance is far from the only one doing this.
You’re really going to have to clarify on “this”. I really am not trying to be obtuse but as far as I see, Americans aren’t going on vacation in Europe to protest abortion or making speeches in support of right wing populists. It’s govt officials doing that. American tourists are friendly on average.
Vance, go back to your couch fucking you shirty twat, no one wants you here.
The most British response I have ever read.
Sorry i forgot to mention i was sipping me tea there mate.
Religion poisons everything.
