In 2022, Northern Ireland’s Assembly passed the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which received Royal Assent on February 6, 2023. The bill, which came some years after Ireland’s repeal of its abortion ban, was proposed to protect women who were seeking an abortion from being harassed outside of abortion centres. This type of legislation is rather widespread throughout the West and, though abortion opponents have pointed out that it violates free speech, has become more or less a default in progressive-run areas.
But Northern Ireland’s law took it a step further. On July 2, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) published a written answer to the Northern Ireland Policing Board setting out how the law should be understood, and their guidance, though extremely concerning, offers a lesson for conservatives.
A “Safe Access Zone” covers anything within 100 metres of an entrance or exit, and can be extended by up to a further 150 metres, giving a maximum of 250 metres. Wondering where the line is if it has been expanded? There will likely be some posted signs, but they won’t be wall-to-wall, so you may be left guessing. And many abortions are done within hospitals. Do you have an idea of how far you are at a given moment from a place in a hospital where an abortion is being performed? Probably not.
The guidelines take pains to make clear that hospital chaplains will be unaffected, “unless their activities bring them in a Safe Access Zone in connection with abortion services.” Saying a quick prayer in the wrong spot can be an offence. And it does not matter if you intended to commit an offence; as the police write, “Under the act, it is sufficient that a person was reckless as to whether their behaviour had one of those effects.” Recklessly praying is now a crime in Northern Ireland.
But it gets worse. “Prayer with patients during end-of-life care” can be a crime, even if asked for by the dying individual or their family, if it happens to occur in a Safe Access Zone and someone could interpret the prayer as offensive to women seeking abortions. So if grandma was placed nearby the abortion wing of the hospital and she asks the chaplain to pray for life, the chaplain might be committing a crime. The same goes for scripture reading. Even carrying a Bible is a crime if it occurs in a Safe Access Zone, as it could be “capable of indirectly or directly influencing a protected person attending for abortion services, or causing them harassment, alarm or distress.” Obviously, distress is in the eye of the beholder; the threat that anyone could simply claim to be in distress at the site of Holy Scripture will obviously result in fewer Bibles being carried openly.
In case that was not all clear enough, the police go on to state outright that a patient asking for care does not nullify the law, as any protected person in the zone could claim harassment. Visible religious practice itself is a crime, so if one crosses themselves in a zone or even clasps their hands in prayer, they could be prosecuted and fined up to £500 (€575).
This all sounds something out of a right-wing propaganda outlet, but it’s entirely real. And it is also, frighteningly, in line with laws which have been sprouting up across Europe.
Neighbouring Scotland passed a similar law in 2024, creating 200-metre zones, which made Safe Access Zones so severe that one cannot use their private home as a basis from which to protest abortion if it falls within a zone. It even received attention from Vice President JD Vance, who lambasted the law on February 14, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference. Critics rushed to say that Vance had been mistaken in his interpretation of the law, but careful listeners and readers would note that they never said that Vance was mistaken. Most rebuttals were confined to the notion that no one had yet been prosecuted for praying at home, which is hardly a defence. After the law was passed, residents were warned not to do anything in their homes which could be interpreted as anti-abortion within the zone, including protesting in their garden. If one becomes a known abortion critic and openly prays in their garden, could someone in the zone claim harassment? Of course. Will that make it so individuals are less likely to pray openly?
Of course.
Further east, Finnish prosecutors pursued a grandmother, Päivi Räsänen, who was also serving as an MP, for years after she tweeted a criticism of a church (of which she was a member) for supporting Pride Month in 2019. State prosecutors pursued her in three separate trials, only finally securing a guilty verdict in the third, on March 26, 2026, for an entirely unrelated “crime”: sending out anti-gay pamphlets in 2004, before gay marriage was even legal in Finland. Her specific crime was “making available to the public a text that insults a group.” The Supreme Court split 3-2 and fined her €1,800.
Of course, not all religions can be insulted in Europe. In Austria, a woman who called Muhammad a paedophile for having a sexual relationship with a nine-year-old was convicted of insulting religion, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights ultimately upheld in 2018, saying that keeping the religious peace was a justifiable reason to restrict her speech. Four years later, when another woman in Poland was convicted of insulting Christianity, saying that the Bible was merely “writings of someone wasted from drinking wine and smoking some weed”, the same court ruled that the conviction was in fact not acceptable.
None of this is particularly surprising in the European Union, which has a freedom of speech but immediately follows that with a lengthy paragraph as to how said speech can be restricted. Said paragraph, like Northern Ireland’s anti-protest law, is vague, allowing governments to limit freedom of speech as much as they would wish.
There is a lesson in this for the Western Right. Northern Ireland’s bill was passed with support from conservative parties, like the Ulster Unionists. And conservatives around Europe support the European Court of Human Rights. These bills and entities have garnered support because public pressure to do so is immense.
“Even if you oppose abortion, surely people should not be hectored while they’re getting one?” “Don’t you support human rights?”
Conservatives must learn to steel themselves against these inauthentic attempts at pulling emotional heartstrings. No, putting magic words together, “human rights” or “international law”, should not spur you to give up your principles. Because the other side will never give up theirs.
