Imagine being fined £9,000 for utterly a silent prayer for the soul of your dead baby son and the other victims of abortion! Because that, in effect, is what just happened to Adam Smith-Connor in Dorset earlier this week.
The British army veteran was found guilty of breaching a pro-abortion “buffer zone” by praying silently near the protected abortuary.
Adam Smith-Connor, 51, was given a two-year conditional discharge (i.e. he is on probation for two years) and ordered to pay costs of £9,000 ($11,700) by District Judge Orla Austin at the Poole Magistrates’ Court in Poole, Dorset.
Smith-Connor was arrested near the British Pregnancy Advisory’s Bournemouth, Dorset, abortion business on November 14, 2022, after praying silently for his son Jacob, who was aborted 22 years ago. The father, currently a physiotherapist, pleaded not guilty to breaching the Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) that forbids protests, offers of help to pregnant women, or pro-life witness of any kind outside the abortion centre for the next three years, from Monday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. When confronting Smith-Connor, who prayed silently with his back toward the clinic, a police officer asked him to describe “the nature of his prayer.”
The aim of the pro-abortion lobby is clearly to drag pro-lifers into a massively draining financial quagmire, in which they suck untold thousands of pounds out of the defenders of unborn babies in Britain. Sadly, being seen to be set free with a 'mere' fine is not seen as any real sort of 'martyrdom' by the public. This means that, for all the outrageous injustice of this so-called 'law', breaking it brings no fresh sense of outrage; it doesn't win new recruits to the pro-life cause; it doesn't save the life of a single unborn child.
We sympathise with and salute Adam, as we do Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, but Pro-lifers need to beware of this trap and adapt tactics accordingly.