LEICESTER, United Kingdom – A new law in Great Britain will enact “safe access zones” outside abortion facilities in England and Wales on Oct. 31, a move the Catholic bishops’ conference calls “unnecessary and disproportionate.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Gillian Merron, said the “safety and wellbeing of women accessing abortion services remains our priority” in the Labour Government which took power in July.
The law received royal assent in May last year under the Conservative government.
The legislation criminalizes a range of activities within a 150-meter (nearly 500 feet) perimeter of an abortion facility.
“No women should feel scared or threatened when accessing these services, and it is only right they are protected from any abuse or harassment,” she said.
The activities banned potentially include prayer, thought, peaceful presence, consensual communication and offers of practical support to women in vulnerable situations.
The Catholic Bishops of Conference of England and Wales says the new legislation remains “deeply concerning” as a threat to freedom of speech, thought, conscience and religion for all people.
“As the Catholic Bishops’ Conference repeatedly stated during the passage of the Public Order Bill last year, ‘safe access zone’ legislation is unnecessary and disproportionate. We condemn all harassment and intimidation of women and hold that, as was accepted in a Home Office Review, there are already laws and mechanisms in place to protect women from such behavior,” said Bishop John Sherrington, the Lead Bishop for Life Issues for the conference.
“In practice, and despite any other intention, this legislation constitutes discrimination and disproportionately affects people of faith,” he said.
However, UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips said the “right to access abortion services” is a fundamental right for women in Britain, and “no one should feel unsafe when they seek to access this.”
“We will not sit back and tolerate harassment, abuse and intimidation as people exercise their legal right to healthcare, which is why we have fast-tracked this measure to get it up and running without further delay,” she said.
“For too long abortion clinics have been without these vital protections, and this government is determined to do all we can do to make this country a safer place for women,” Phillips added.
Catherine Robinson, spokesperson for Right To Life UK, told Sky News the zones will mean “vital practical support provided by volunteers outside abortion clinics, which helps to provide a genuine choice, and offers help to women who may be undergoing coercion, will be removed.”
In his remarks, Sherrington said religious freedom is the foundational freedom of any free and democratic society, “essential for the flourishing and realization of dignity of every human person.”
“Religious freedom includes the right to manifest one’s private beliefs in public through witness, prayer and charitable outreach, including outside abortion facilities,” the bishop said.
“As well as being unnecessary and disproportionate, we have deep concerns around the practical effectiveness of this legislation, particularly given the lack of clarity in relation to the practice of private prayer and offers of help within ‘safe access zones’,” he continued.
“As Pope Francis has reminded us, ‘a healthy pluralism, one which genuinely respects differences and values them as such, does not entail privatizing religions in an attempt to reduce them to the quiet obscurity of the individual’s conscience or to relegate them to the enclosed precincts of churches, synagogues or mosques,” Sherrington continued.
“This would represent, in effect, a new form of discrimination and authoritarianism’. By legislating for and implementing so-called ‘safe access zones’, the UK Government has taken an unnecessary and disproportionate step backwards in the protection of religious and civic freedoms in England and Wales,” he said.
