Abortion protests: is free speech in retreat?

"Hair in a grey bob with a small gold cross around her neck, 64-year-old Livia Tossici-Bolt might seem an unlikely choice of a global cause célèbre," said Nicholas Pyke in the Daily Mail. But the activist has become the face of a transatlantic row over free speech after being convicted for breaching an abortion clinic "buffer zone" in 2023. Tossici-Bolt, who stood outside the Bournemouth clinic with a sign saying, "Here to talk, if you want", has been given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay £20,000 in costs.

The Trump administration called it disappointing. And they're right, said Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator. Tossici-Bolt wasn't aggressive; all she did was respectfully offer an "alternative" opinion on abortion, as anyone in a free country is allowed to do. Not here in Britain, though. I saw footage of a community support officer asking another respectful protester, outside a Birmingham clinic, whether she was praying. That was the point at which I thought: the country is "going to hell".

To listen to Tossici-Bolt's supporters, you'd think she was some "brutally censored dissident", said Catherine Bennett in The Observer. The US vice president, J.D. Vance, said such cases in the UK are proof that free speech is in "retreat" in the West. What nonsense. There's nothing to prevent Tossici-Bolt "from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere" – except right in patients' faces, outside clinics.

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Before the buffer zones were implemented, said Aine Fox in London's The Standard, women entering clinics faced all sorts of coercion from pro-life demonstrators, from the violent ("spitting"; "physically blocking people") to the milder but equally distressing ("baby socks being hung on a nearby hedge"). The whole point of these zones is to protect another vital freedom: "to access medical care safely without intimidation".

It's true: deciding to abort a child is painful enough without being "harassed by a stranger", said the Daily Mail. Still, weighing up such protections against free speech is a "fine balance" – and it's not clear the UK has got it right. There was already a "climate of censorship" here, what with cancel culture, no-platforming and the "vigilantism" of trans-rights activists. Now we've convicted someone for holding a non-confrontational sign. Whatever one's views of abortion, shouldn't the idea of making a "polite 64-year-old woman" pay £20,000 for trying to strike up a consensual conversation "make us all feel a little queasy"?