In February 2023, buffer zones around abortion clinics were brought in nationally following an amendment to the Public Order Bill. A Government consultation on implementation ends on 22nd January 2024:
On Friday 19th January 2024, a Christian preacher faced trial in Uxbridge Magistrates Court at 10am for displaying a Bible verse outside an abortion facility inside a ‘buffer zone’ in Ealing in London.
There was much discussion of the relevance, if any, of a certain Bible verse to abortion! The trial finished quite late, so Judge Burgess decided to think about it and give her judgment on Thursday 1st February at 2pm.
At a preliminary hearing on Tuesday 17th October 2023, solicitor Robert Smith told the court that Ealing Council’s decision to prosecute Stephen Green infringes his human rights. Mr Smith, defending, told the court: “My client does not accept the charges brought against him. He does not believe his action meets the charges brought.
“In the event that they do, he cites in his defence articles 9, 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 9 is freedom of belief, Article 10 is freedom of expression and Article 11 is freedom of assembly.”
But more than that, the commandments of Jesus Christ himself compel Christians to preach the word.
Sign our Petition against ‘Buffer Zones’ →
Verse from the Psalms
The Christian Voice National Director is being prosecuted by Ealing Council for doing no more than displaying a verse from the Book of Psalms outside MSI Reproductive Choices clinic on 6th Feb 2023.
His sign said: “Psalm 139:13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.”
The campaigner, who is being supported by the Christian Legal Centre, is alleged to have broken a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) that prohibits “protesting, namely engaging in an act of approval/disapproval, with respect to issues related to abortion services”
Politicians and campaigners have decried the introduction of buffer zones as deeply draconian measures that criminalise free speech and prevent vulnerable women from accessing alternatives to abortion.
Protest against Buffer Zones
Mr Green accepts he was outside Marie Stopes, but says he was perfectly within his rights to hold up the placard as a protest, not against abortion, but against the buffer zone. In any event, Marie Stopes staff called the police, who categorised the matter as an emergency, but took more than forty minutes to arrive, by which time Mr Green had left.
Almost at once, Ealing Council sent the activist a fixed penalty notice demanding £100. When he refused to pay, in September 2023, they issued the summons.
If found guilty, Mr Green, from Carmarthen in South Wales, could be fined £1,000 and would face six months in prison if he failed to pay.
Oppressive
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “It is worrying that a man in his 70s holding a sign with a Bible verse on it is now being treated as an ‘emergency’ situation by the police.
“Buffer zones are an oppressive part of the current culture which force consent and silence dissent. The effect of the PSPO is to criminalise any act of disapproval of abortion and to create an area where no discussion or even prayer relating to abortion is permitted.
“There have now been over 10 million abortions in the UK since abortion was legalised in 1967. That is a staggering number. That is almost twice the population of Scotland and more than the entire population of London. Millions of people would be alive today if abortion had not been legalised.
“Instead of lamenting this loss of life, we are industrialising it, making it ever easier to obtain abortion effectively on demand, and now we are criminalising dissent.
“We will stand with Mr Green as he seeks justice in this case.”
PRAY: that God is glorified. Pray for wisdom for the Christian Concern legal team and favour with God and with the magistrates on 19th January.
The story so far has been reported in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Independent, The London Evening Standard Ealing Times, Christian Today, The Jersey Evening Post and Epoch Times.
Your support in Uxbridge on 19th January 2024 will be welcome.
Read our previous articles
Bible on Trial as CV director faces court →
Buffer Zone Challenge Videos →
Buffer Zone Challenge Progress →
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God is on our side, and we will fight with you Stephen!!!
Well done. Definately a human rights issue. It makes you wonder what do householders feel about living within a cordon where they are not allowed to step outside their houses and meditate? As far as I can tell the effect of the buffer zones will be to put that person in danger of being arrested for doing a prohibited act. The ridiculous thing is, in order for the CPS to be able to prove a person was meditating or praying, they have to get the person to admit it. All you need to do is refuse to admit you were praying/meditating/thinking, within the buffer zone and the prosecution cannot prove that you were.
Hopefully the sheer stupidity of these laws will bring them down. In the meantime, get as much publicity as you can.
I see a mixture of different issues here but I am very moved to write this. I humbly ask you to consider these points before you dismiss them outright.
Firstly, a previous comment was advocating that you deny that you were praying as part of the case against you suggesting that the onus was on you to admit guilt. I must say that is poor advice as they are, in fact asking you to be intentionally dishonest and lie about your purpose there. That is not honouring behaviour as ambassadors for our Lord. If honest dialogue leads to my imprisonment, then that is my portion and my calling.
Human rights are a huge area of contention and I agree largely on their premise. Whilst I see that Christians, sometimes draw the short straws for standing up for our beliefs we are also, at the same time, largely part of the problem especially when we preach against certain lifestyles that we deem ungodly. Those parties will claim that their human rights are being abused with the same token. Thus we cannot have this both ways. Whilst we may believe with utmost sincerity in the sinfulness of those parties, I do not think we should be legalistic in our approach. Jesus never told us to do such but he did call us to turn the cheek.
To illustrate, in America, we see the movement of Christian MAGA pursuing this kind of agenda against abortion and other “sins” legislatively and I believe it is an abomination to seek Christian nationalism. It is also disappointing that they have chosen to align themselves with a person full of deceitfulness and lawlessness. It is just Phariseeism under a Christian label. Whilst I might agree LGBT is wrong for me, I am under no such obligation to deny others their choice to commit their own sins. I often wonder if they believe that those sins are contagious and need containment. Sin is sin and we are all guilty one way or another. We are not fundamentally better because we are Christian. Our hearts were just as evil before we were offered redemption.
Sometimes I see the same behaviours online that put us only one step away from this. Whilst we might agree that abortion on demand is wrong, we should also think through our case far more carefully. It isn’t actually water-tight and subject to the same criticism. In their religious zeal to ban all kinds of perceived evils through legislative means, they have actually perpetrated equivalent evils through a very obvious lack of compassion, love or forgiveness. Correspondingly, they have promoted division, hatred, bigotry, violence and vengeance. Scripture never tasked us with legislative control which is why I see Christian nationalism as an abomination. When it was successfully enacted in our own history, it also precipitated the Dark Ages and a very dark period of church history. We do well to learn from the mistakes of our forefathers.
Abortion is certainly an emotive issue but I do not see the same extent of murder that others do. I used to do so in my early days as a new believer. I have had a few decades to think through this. It should not even be a polarising issue yet those same MAGA Christians will call anyone Satanic if they hold any other view. Let me be frank. Life and personhood are different things yet universally amongst Christians, they are conflated by language. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the two are very distinct both biologically and theologically. Whilst Ps139 does say that God is the author of creation, it does not automatically imply personhood began at conception. If you tie God down, are you not limiting His omnipotence? For those adamant that Ps139 does, consider this; every year, besides abortion, millions of foetuses are subject to miscarriages. What do you suppose happened to their personhood? Why did God create them only to destroy them, intentionally? Now there is no doubt that life as unique DNA occurs at conception but I know of biological instances that demonstrate that DNA is not the arbiter of new life even for personhood. For example, chimeras stab that idea down the middle. The arguments are long, technical somewhat even philosophical but to ignore them is the equivalent of burying your head in the sand. You do need some basic understanding of biological processes to fully appreciate the gravity of those arguments. Those who ignore this are in danger of backing themselves into a corner that diminishes who their god is. I have absolutely no doubt that God is sovereign. The problem with insisting that personhood is always created at conception leads to the danger of implying that God is at the same time not quite sovereign. I had to think and meditate long and hard over this.
I contend that the Jewish position was right but we have ignored it. Life (meaning personhood) begins at first breath. It is only we as modern-day evangelicals that suddenly decided after almost 2000 years to shift that time line back towards conception. I found it strange that Jesus was never recorded in all of scripture to challenge this view as much as He had plenty to criticise the Pharisees and teachers of the law about. The same for the apostles and the early church fathers. In fact, abortion does not even appear to be on the radar at the time of Jesus even though the practice is as old as time. To me, it means my energies are far better invested in things that promote love, peace and harmony rather than confrontation and hatred. It also means to me that abortion does not have the same gravity of wrong that is often attributed to it. I am not trying to demean anyone else’s calling here. I just know that the modern drift towards anti-abortion rhetoric has not always been rooted in sound arguments both physical and theological but on emotive starting points with a long list of disingenuous propositions along the way such as the idea of a foetal heartbeat.
Finally, in all of this, I find we Christians sometimes seem to forget that we live inside a fallen creation, yet half the time we behave as if Genesis 3 did not exist or follow Genesis 1 and 2. We talk in absolutes where things are absolutely black and white and insist things have to be perfectly right or else it is wrong. Sorry, but I see that Genesis 3 tells me to expect plenty of wrongs in this world with plenty of shades of grey in between, that will only be righted when God does it and on his terms, not ours.
Thanks, Kai. Far too long to answer in any detail. Just to pick up on a couple of points.
1 It is up to the prosecution to prove the accused guilty.
2 The early disciples were put to death for breaking the law, For confrontation, For doing what God in Christ told them to do but which the law said they must not do.
3 The early church definitely stood against child destruction.
4 On ‘Christian nationalism’, scripture shows clearly the nation is blessed which humbly follows the laws of God. God demands obedience and he gave us his laws out of love for mankind, because he knows full well we shall never get it right in our own strength.
5 ‘LGBT rights’ are NOT human rights in any international treaty. The Yogyakarta gang tried to pretend they were, but that’s another story.
6 Some things are black and white. We are called to seek the peace of the city, and that means prophetically standing against evil as well as praying for our leaders.
May the Lord bless you as you seek a Christian world-view!
‘Blessed are they who are persecuted in my names sake for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.’
We now need the followers of ‘the way’ to join Stephen and stand in the name of the Lord to reveal the D-evil Moloch behind the abortionists.