Routine hospital pastoral ministry may fall foul of abortion buffer zone laws, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has threatened.

Following the conviction of retired pastor Clive Johnston for preaching the Gospel within one of Northern Ireland’s controversial abortion censorship zones, questions have been asked as to what else might be deemed criminal behaviour. The Christian Institute is helping Pastor Clive to appeal.

When asked on the implications of legislation for clergy and pastors “going about their normal day-to-day work in hospitals”, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said that prayer, Scripture reading and carrying a Bible within a designated area ‘may constitute an offence’.

The Chief Constable explained that where a pastoral visitor is invited to pray with a patient receiving end-of-life care, for example, “and that patient is not attending for abortion services, this activity falls outside the scope of the Act”.

But, he added, where “it takes place within a Safe Access Zone, the lawfulness of that activity will depend on whether it could reasonably influence, cause distress to, or impede a protected person nearby”.

He stated: “As with prayer, scripture reading conducted at the express request of a patient or their family, with a patient not attending for abortion services, is not the conduct this legislation was designed to address.

“However, the same principle applies – if such activity takes place within a Safe Access Zone and a reasonable person would recognise it as capable of indirectly influencing or distressing a protected person, an offence may be committed, regardless of the consensual nature of the activity between the clergy member and their patient.”

He said that carrying a Bible “through public areas of hospitals” or providing pastoral ministry “within wards or hospital grounds” may also be illegal under the Act.

Mr Johnston held an open-air service on the fringes of the buffer zone around Coleraine’s Causeway Hospital last year.

His actions – preaching “For God so loved the world” while standing near a large cross inside the zone – were deemed “reckless” as to whether they would ‘influence’ someone accessing the hospital’s abortion services. He did not mention abortion, nor were there banners or placards.

Five days after delivering her premature baby girl at just 29 weeks, mother Taylor Plemmons was finally able to hold her daughter, Margot.

Taylor described the moment she was able to hold her daughter for the first time as “the sweetest and scariest feeling in the world”.

“When the nurse placed her in my arms, I exhaled for the first time since seeing two pink lines”, explains mum Taylor. “She was impossibly small, far tinier than my mind could comprehend, yet perfectly formed. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes”, she says.

“When I began to speak, she lifted her eyes and settled against me. In that moment, the fear quieted”, Taylor reminisces. “I knew she was fragile, but I didn’t yet understand the depth of her strength. After so much uncertainty and loss, I was finally holding my daughter, and that was all that mattered”.

At around 10 weeks of pregnancy, Taylor was diagnosed with a subchorionic haematoma, a condition in which blood forms between a baby’s amniotic sac and the uterine wall. This caused her to experience several haemorrhages.

Doctors offered Taylor the possibility of having an abortion. Instead, Taylor says, the news “ignited a determination in me to fight for her”, and she “focused on the present moment and what was directly in front of me, rather than all the ways things could go wrong”.

As the pregnancy continued, Taylor developed further complications. At 16 weeks, her alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) level was elevated, indicating that baby Margot was at increased risk of certain health problems. Three weeks later, Margot was diagnosed with severe growth restriction. At 23 weeks, Taylor developed pre-eclampsia, a condition that can cause serious complications during pregnancy. She was hospitalised so that she and her unborn baby could be closely monitored for the remainder of the pregnancy.

Although the medical team worked “tirelessly to prolong the pregnancy as safely as possible”, Taylor’s condition continued to worsen. At 29 weeks, her pre-eclampsia progressed into HELLP syndrome, a rare but life-threatening pregnancy condition.

“We were given one hour’s notice to proceed with an emergency C-section to save both of our lives”, Taylor explains. “It was a surreal moment. I had spent my entire pregnancy preparing for an early delivery, so in a strange way I was grateful to have made it to 29 weeks. At the same time, I was in shock”.

Despite being repeatedly warned that baby Margot might not survive, Taylor celebrated the moment she finally held her daughter in her arms. And eventually, after 82 days in hospital, Margot was able to return home on Good Friday to her mum, dad, and her older sister, Scottie.

Reflecting on her experience, Taylor says it transformed the way she views motherhood and the gift of life.

“When I became pregnant with Margot, I carried a heightened awareness of just how miraculous life truly is, how many things must go right, how many cells must divide perfectly, and how deeply a mother’s body is asked to carry and sustain a child”, she explained. “This experience stripped away my desire to be perfectly put together or to live a curated life. It shifted my priorities entirely”.

“I want to cherish my daughters for the miracles they are”, Taylor explained. “If my story can help someone feel less alone, then something meaningful has come from the hardest seasons of my life”.

On June 29, outgoing U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that the British House of Commons is “the gayest Parliament … in the world.”

Starmer, who resigned on June 22, hosted an LGBT event for “pride” month at 10 Downing Street. He was introduced by lesbian Labour MP Olivia Bailey, who joked that her hairstyle was inspired by Starmer’s and introduced him as a “lesbian style icon.”

Starmer, beaming, responded to that introduction with great pleasure. “Lesbian style icon, I like that,” the prime minister said. (To imagine any of his esteemed predecessors uttering such a line stretches the mind to breaking point.)

“I’m really proud that we’ve got the gayest Parliament,” he declared. “I don’t think, just of all time, anywhere in the world, I don’t think there’s any Parliament that is gayer than this Parliament. That is fantastic.” 

The U.K. Parliament has 76 members who identify as LGBT, with 62 MPs from Starmer’s Labour Party, four from the Tories, one from the Green Party, and eight from the Liberal Democrats. Starmer emphasized during his speech that the Labour government will function as the political arm of the LGBT movement in every respect possible.

“I want to be clear that all lesbians, all gay, all bi and trans people – that this government will defend your rights,” he stated. “We have to stand against the politics of division.” He highlighted his “full trans-inclusive ban on abusive conversion practices” that outlaw “a very sinister idea … trying to suggest that identities aren’t legitimate.”

Ironically, Starmer’s “conversion therapy ban” is an extraordinarily totalitarian piece of legislation that defines “abusive conversion practices” as including “controlling or coercive words or behavior” and “psychological or emotional pressure". This is aimed not only at Christians and other traditionalists who offer help to confused individuals to go straight, or at least to avoid getting themselves poisoned or mutilated, it could even make it illegal for parents to affirm their child’s biological sex and criminalize body-affirming therapy for people who struggle with gender dysphoria.

A man in Texas has been charged with secretly administering abortion pills that ended the life of an unborn child.

Jon Rueben Demeter is due to appear before a judge for the “Performance of an Abortion” and “Injury to a Child”, following the death of Presley Mae, a baby girl stillborn at 14 weeks.

Montgomery County Law enforcement officers were called by a local hospital to investigate a suspicious miscarriage. Demeter was arrested shortly afterwards under suspicion of giving the pregnant woman abortion-inducing drugs without her knowledge or consent.

According to investigators, Demeter crushed an abortion pill he had obtained online and “mixed it in a water bottle” to give to the young woman with the “specific intent to cause the death of the child”.

The pregnant woman, who had previously been encouraged by Demeter to get an abortion, told the Sheriff’s Office that had she intended to keep her daughter.

At a press conference last month, Sheriff Wesley Doolittle said: “She had 10 fingers, 10 toes, and an entire lifetime of possibilities ahead of her. That future was stolen before it ever had a chance to begin.”

Speaking at the same event, District Attorney Michael R. Holley added: “I’m grateful I live in a place where little lives matter. And I’m grateful I live in a place where our ladies’ lives matter and that violence against our ladies is unacceptable in any form.”

Seventeen babies were born alive in Alberta following labor-induced late-term abortions in 2025 and left to die. That's just one thinly populated state in Canada, so just imagine the death toll from late-term abortions worldwide.

No life-sustaining intervention. No automatic presumption in favour of care. No clear, system-wide requirement that birth triggers a clinical reset. Instead, within the system administered by Alberta Health Services, the response is shaped in advance. As a matter of standard procedure, the child is left to die.

And it happens, again and again, every single day. It might be in Alberta again, but it may well be in an abortion clinic near you. Pray for these little ones, and resolve to do even more to end the violence and injustice - and the sheer inhumanity - of abortion.

Rhoda Grant, a former Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Labour Party, has called for Labour Party MPs to follow the lead of their Scottish colleagues and reject the reintroduced assisted suicide Bill.

The Scottish Bill was defeated in March 2026 by 69 votes to 57, with the Deputy Political Editor of The Scotsman, David Bol, describing the vote as “potentially the biggest decision in the history of the Scottish Parliament”. Now, Rhoda Grant is calling on her Labour Party colleagues in Westminster to follow suit.

In an article for Labour List, Grant explained that she and her Labour Party colleagues in Scotland voted to reject the assisted suicide Bill precisely because of their progressive and left-wing convictions.

The former Labour MSP said that the “Bill risks fuelling tensions within the Labour Party at a particularly sensitive political moment”, adding that the debate in Westminster is caricatured as “compassionate progressives” versus “socially conservative opponents”. 

In Scotland, however, Grant said that opposition to the assisted suicide Bill came from Labour values of “solidarity, equality, disability rights, and the protection of vulnerable people”.

Grant argues that the Labour movement was built on the belief that people are not truly free “when crushed by poverty, insecurity, isolation or structural disadvantage”, adding that legalising assisted suicide “risks undermining that principle”.

Choice “does not exist in a vacuum”, she says, explaining that a “choice” made with excellent care is not the same as one made by someone who feels a burden, lacks support, fears loneliness, or thinks their care needs are exhausting their family – all factors that would likely influence people in their decision to end their lives by assisted suicide. 

She adds that, in unequal societies, pressure is not always obvious; it is “shaped by economic and cultural pressure rather than overt coercion”, warning that the genuinely progressive answer is not to make death more accessible while leaving suffering unresolved, but to work to reduce suffering through providing better care. “No citizen should ever feel that death is their best option because society failed to provide sufficient care or support”, she said. 

The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) has halted its participation in LGBT ‘Pride’.

Head Jayne Brady told staff that “in the current legal and case law context, the NICS is not in a position to participate in Pride events this year in an official capacity, where colleagues would be identifiable as representing the organisation”.

However, she added, the decision did not reflect any wider change in NICS “commitment to LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion”.

The Christian Institute’s James Kennedy said: “It is a simple fact that Pride parades are political events. From waving flags for controversial new policies to welcoming or banning political parties based on their stances, everything about them shouts ‘politics’. Their proponents call them protests and they give a platform to outlandish ideologies and identities. There is nothing neutral about them.

“In that light, it is not surprising that Northern Ireland’s Civil Service has told its staff to put away their specially printed ‘NICS at Pride’ t-shirts this year. What is outrageous is how the supposedly ‘impartial’ Civil Service has continued to support Pride for so many years.

“Last year’s Pride event campaigned for puberty-blocking drugs to be given to teenagers, amidst financial support from the PSNI, Translink and NICS. At least this year, we know a little less of our public money will be thrown at these ideological causes.”

An abortionist testifying in an ongoing lawsuit against pro-life pregnancy centers struggled to give a clear answer when asked if he could swear under oath to the abortion industry’s insistence that abortion pill reversal (APR) is ineffective.

In 2023, California Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a lawsuit against Heartbeat International and RealOptions Obria Medical Clinics, the latter of which runs a chain of counseling centers in the northern part of California, accusing them of violating the state’s False Advertising Law and Unfair Competition Law and seeking an injunction blocking them from promoting APR.

The abortion pill mifepristone (RU-486) works by blocking the natural hormone progesterone that developing babies need to survive. APR consists of administering extra progesterone to counteract mifepristone’s effects, ideally within 24 hours of taking the abortion pill.

Among those Bonta called to build his case was abortionist Mitchell Creinin, author of a study funded by the leftist Society for Family Planning that the abortion lobby has claimed proves APR is unsafe. However, in his newly uncovered deposition, Creinin’s answers painted a far less convincing picture.

Over the course of being repeatedly asked if he could “swear under oath that APR does not work,” Creinin attempted to split hairs, insisting he could swear “that I have no evidence that it does work,” while apparently admitting “I cannot swear under oath” to the definitive statement that it does not. Repeated requests for a simple “yes or no” answer to the question went in vain.

He was even more noncommittal about claims that APR is unsafe, maintaining he had concerns about not following up mifepristone with misoprostol but admitting that he himself prescribes progesterone for off-label uses. “I offer it to patients and tell them the pros and cons, and it’s the patient who decides if she wants to use it,” he testified. “In the short term, it’s safe. In the long term, there is an association with thyroid cancer. So it’s up to them to decide if the… potential benefit outweighs the potential risk.”

Critically, at one point Creinin dismissed pro-APR doctors on the grounds that they are “bound to uphold science in the same way, and they demonstrate they don’t when they try to do statistical analyses on ten people or three people. That’s not science.” It was later pointed out that his own study started with just 12 people, which fell to 10 when two dropped out.