A 75-year-old woman has been acquitted after a judge dismissed charges against her for offering conversation within an abortion censorship zone.

Rose Docherty, who is a Roman Catholic, was arrested last year for holding the sign: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want” outside Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow. She did not approach anyone, or speak about abortion.

Sheriff Stuart Reid ruled that the prosecution “failed to disclose an offence known to the law of Scotland”, but noted that the case can be brought back if the prosecution provides evidence that she had ‘influenced’ any person within the 200-metre zone.

Responding to the ruling, Docherty stated: “I was arrested, charged and prosecuted for nothing more than peacefully inviting consensual conversation in a public space that I was permitted to be in. When I was arrested, I was handcuffed, placed in the back of a police van and placed in a police cell for over two hours, without a chair to sit on.

“Simply for being available for the lonely, the afraid and the coerced, I have been treated like a violent criminal. But thankfully, today the charges have been dismissed. The judge ruled that the charges were irrelevant and that they were a breach of my Article 10 free speech rights.”

Jeremiah Igunnubole of Alliance Defending Freedom International, which supported the case, added: “No one should ever be criminalised for peaceful speech, least of all for making a peaceful and consensual offer to speak.

“It is bad enough to be prosecuted for exercising a fundamental right; it is far worse that the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service brought these charges without conducting even the most basic investigative inquiries, such as establishing whether anyone had been criminally influenced by Rose’s conduct within the ‘buffer zone’.”

Under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Act, people risk an unlimited fine for handing out pro-life literature, speaking to anyone about abortion or praying silently within 200m of an abortion centre.

Growing public unease about assisted suicide in Britain is matched not only by the Fierce resistance of the house of Lords, but also now by increasing concern among MPs.   

New polling has suggested that more MPs would oppose the assisted suicide Bill than could be relied upon to back it if the Bill were revived in the next parliamentary session.

The polling, which was carried out by Whitestone Insight, found that only 41% of MPs surveyed can definitely be relied upon to vote “Aye” again, while 45% said they would continue to vote no, suggesting that if the legislation were put to a vote today, it would likely be rejected by the House of Commons.

Only 12 MPs need to change from supporting the previous Bill to opposing the new Bill for the new Bill to fail, and the poll suggests that any MP considering bringing back the assisted suicide Bill after the King’s Speech would likely be destined to fail.

In addition, a majority of MPs surveyed, approximately 61%, recognise the authority of the House of Lords to amend, block or reject the legislation if safeguards are deemed inadequate. Only 28% of MPs do not recognise this. 

According to the polling, 47% of MPs believe that such a rejection of the assisted suicide Bill by the House of Lords would not trigger a “constitutional crisis”, while only 41% believe that it might. 

The polling also revealed that many MPs have serious concerns about the safety of the assisted suicide Bill. Almost half (49%) of MPs polled expressed a fear that the assisted suicide Bill, if legalised, would lead to systemic pressure on elderly people and people with disabilities to opt for assisted suicide, when they otherwise would not have considered it. 

Only 43% of MPs surveyed believe that the current safeguards in the assisted suicide Bill are sufficient, while a majority of them, 52%, are not certain that the legislation would prevent coercion or error from occurring. Additionally, 43% of MPs stated that they knew of someone who voted in favour of the assisted suicide Bill with the expectation that the House of Lords would work to “make it safe”. 

The idea of state sanctioned killing is falling out of favour. There is no longer a consensus in favour of legalislation on assisted suicide in Britain, a polling expert has said.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, James Johnson — Co-Founder of pollsters JL Partners — says he believes the shift in public opinion can be attributed to disquiet over safeguarding deficiencies in MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill.

Conducted between 14 and 22 March, JL Partners canvassed voters’ attitudes towards assisted suicide among 2,048 adults living in England and Wales.

Support for Baroness Meacher’s assisted suicide Bill five years ago, Johnson recalls, was evident in focus group conversations and research conducted by his own company.

Having previously believed that assisted suicide legislation “had the support of the British public to become law”, he now takes “the opposite view” on Leadbeater’s Bill. He observed: “As the proposal stands in 2026, there is not public consent for its passage.”

Recent polling, he argued, reveals that voters have “deep reservations” when they learn more about the Bill and want “nothing to do with it”.

In his analysis of the findings, Johnson reported that among the 63 per cent of people who currently back assisted suicide in principle, two in three “want to see more safeguards for terminally ill people. Three in four (72 per cent) say it is more important to strictly define the eligibility of assisted dying than to continue with the changes.”

He continued: “Nearly eight in ten – 78 per cent – say someone must explicitly be offered other options like hospice or palliative care before proceeding.”

Referring to all respondents, he added: “By overwhelming margins, people think a vast array of people currently eligible under the Bill should not be: pregnant women (82 points), people with eating disorders (74 points), people with mental health issues (74 points), people expressing suicidal thoughts (74 points), and homeless people (72 points).”

“A man who was convicted for abusing children. He sent me messages. Letters where he threatened my children.”

A Finnish Member of Parliament and medical doctor, Päivi Räsänen, has paid a high price she for defending Scripture. In addition to a paedophile threatening her children, a bomb bomb went off in her mailbox and leftist thugs have attempted to gain entrance into her home.

Räsänen, a mother of five and grandmother of 12, has battled “hate speech” charges for many years. It began with her 2004 pamphlet Male and Female He Created Them, which simply restated the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality. The case exploded when she tweeted a photo of Romans 1 criticizing her own Lutheran church’s support for Pride events.

After multiple acquittals in lower courts, Finland’s Supreme Court has convicted her on “hate crime” charges for the 2004 pamphlet just last month. She rejects the ruling saying emphatically: “I think that what Bible teaches it is love speech…”

She warns Christians around the world:

“You should be very careful when there are proposals of so-called hate crime laws… They are vague, they are so unpredictable. They can be used against almost anyone.” To Christians facing the same storm, her warning is clear and urgent:

“Now is the time to speak. It is not the time to be silent or practice self-censorship… You should boldly preach and speak about these teachings and about Jesus — not be silent.”

Persecuted Pastor Clive Johnston must wait to discover the outcome of his legal case, after the judge in his 'Safe Zone' censorship case announced he was reserving his judgment until Thursday 7 May.

The retired pastor is being prosecuted for preaching the Gospel during an open-air Sunday service in one of Northern Ireland’s controversial abortion ‘Safe Access Zones’, and has been charged with attempting to ‘influence’ anyone seeking to access Coleraine’s Causeway Hospital’s abortion services.

This is despite the clinic being closed on Sundays, and there also being no mention of abortion during the preaching and no banners or placards.

After today’s hearing before a District Judge at Coleraine Magistrates’ Court, Pastor Clive Johnston said: “I’m glad the judge has decided to go away and have a think about this case before issuing his ruling because there is a lot at stake.

“We held a small, open-air Sunday service near a hospital. We made no reference whatsoever to the issue of abortion. And yet prosecutors say the buffer-zones law is so broad that holding our Sunday service was a criminal offence.

“As we now await a ruling, my wife Sheila and I want to take this opportunity to thank the many people who have supported us, especially my legal team, Colin Dougan, Aaron Thompson and John Larkin, and also our brothers and sisters at The Christian Institute whose personal support has been invaluable.

“It’s a difficult thing to go through but we are upheld by the prayers of God’s people and we have drawn near to Christ for help and strength. Christ is the most precious thing in the world to us and that is why we are so keen to talk about him in the highways and byways of this land that we love.”

Last week, the US State Department revealed that it is “monitoring” the “concerning” prosecution of Pastor Clive Johnston.

A US spokesman told The Daily Telegraph: “The United States is still monitoring many buffer zone cases in the UK, as well as other acts of censorship throughout Europe.”

Referring to the case of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the spokesman added: “The UK’s persecution of silent prayer represents not only an egregious violation of the fundamental right to free speech and religious liberty, but also a concerning departure from the shared values that ought to underpin US-UK relations.”

The Government has announced plans to financially incentivise abortion clinics to provide ‘lunch-hour’ or ‘same-day’ abortions.

The changes were announced last week as part of the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England.

Under the current NHS Payment Scheme, abortion clinics are typically paid separately for each part of the abortion pathway – the consultation, scan, and procedure. This encourages abortion providers not to rush the process in one day, and also gives women more time to consider their decision before the actual abortion procedure happens.

Under the Government’s new approach (page 28), abortion clinics will now be paid a bundled payment for providing all stages of the process – and the Government has made it clear they are doing this to financially incentivise clinics to provide abortion “consultations, scans and procedures on the same day”.

This will financially incentivise the UK’s largest private abortion providers, BPAS, MSI Reproductive Choices, and NUPAS, which are paid to provide most of the abortions provided through the NHS, to rush women into abortions with ‘same day’ or ‘lunch-hour’ abortions.

Abortion provider MSI Reproductive Choice (formerly Marie Stopes International) has in the past marketed ‘lunch-hour’ abortion services – walk-in abortion services aimed to fit into a woman’s lunch hour.

The planned changes will likely see women being rushed through the abortion process, being given little time to process and contemplate whether to go ahead with what, for many, is a life-changing decision to have an abortion.

Already, women have complained of feeling they are on a conveyor belt towards abortion, and this has been corroborated by a doctor who used to work for one of the largest abortion providers in the country. 

There is also already evidence of a high-pressure environment in abortion clinics where women can be rushed into abortion decisions, with, for example, the Care Quality Commission finding MSI Reproductive Choices were paying staff bonuses for encouraging women to undergo abortions.

At all 70 Marie Stopes clinics, inspectors found evidence of a policy that saw staff utilise a high-pressure sales tactic, calling women who had decided against having an abortion to offer them another appointment.  

In what was described as a “cattle market culture”, staff felt “encouraged” to ensure women went through with abortions. Staff described this as a “very target-driven culture”.

Canada is in the grip of a state Death Cult. More than million unborn babies have been killed in Canada since the legalisation of abortion, and almost 100,000 people have died from euthanasia since Justin Trudeau’s government legalised it in 2016.

Growing unease about the deadly trends are enthusing ever-growing numbers of Christians to plan to join the 29th annual Canadian National March for Life on May 14th.

Organised by Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), the march marks Canada’s 1969 Day of Infamy, when the Liberal government’s Omnibus Bill unleashed legal abortion on the nation. The theme of the march is “Follow Me,” a reference to Jesus’s call in Matthew 4:19 to His disciples: “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

“When Jesus said ‘Follow Me,’ the disciples dropped everything. They didn’t hesitate. They moved,” organisers said. “Not all of us are called to do pro-life work full-time, but we are all called to sacrifice for the cause. Take up your cross! We cannot continue with ‘business as usual’ in the face of the human rights injustices of abortion, IVF, and euthanasia. Can we not drop our nets for a day to be part of the largest annual pro-life demonstrations in Canada?”

More than five million preborn babies have been killed in Canada since the Omnibus bill, with almost 100,000 people also dying from euthanasia since the government of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau legalized it in 2016 under the euphemistic heading of “Medical Assistance in Dying.” In addition, a countless number of lives have been lost to the embryo-destructive practice of in vitro fertilisation.

“The truth is, the world is watching Canada right now. They’re watching Canada with horror, right?” CLC’s Josie Luetke and Vice President Matthew Wojciechowski have said. “Our own government is killing people, up to almost 100,000 in the last decade, so we’re killing people at the end of life, and the beginning of life, and all throughout life.”

Fortunately, the March for Life ensures that killing is not all the world will see

A filmmaker and data analyst warned that the falling birth rate crisis across the globe couldn’t be “any worse.”

Stephen Shaw, who interviewed people around the world to investigate plummeting birthrates for his documentary Birthgap, recently told podcaster Brendan O’Neill that population collapse is a uniquely dangerous problem. This is because unlike the dangers of, say, nuclear proliferation and environmental issues, there are no known solutions to declining birth rates, according to Shaw.

“This is in a category of one in terms of how bad it is,” he told O’Neill. The majority of countries now have a fertility rate below replacement level, and as of 2024, the world fertility rate was 2.2, only very slightly above replacement, according to the Population Reference Bureau. 

Unlike commentators who pin the crisis on intentional choices to remain childless, Shaw says the reality is more complicated. In his analysis, he has found that unplanned childlessness is the main driver of falling birth rates. In fact, mothers who do have children have the same average family size as mothers decades ago.

It was in the 1970s that fertility rates in Western nations began to converge in a rapid decline. Shaw pointed out in Birthgap that from about 1973 to 1978, childlessness rates skyrocketed in many countries, including Italy and Japan, driving the declining birth rates.

Shaw points out that the current cultural norm is for young people to not take relationships seriously, let alone think about children, until they are in their mid- to late 20s.

“What do you do if you’re 18 in high school and you’re like your other classmates. You’re probably not thinking they’re the person you’re going to settle down and have a family with … probably college age too.”

By mid- to late 20s, “even if you wanted to take it seriously, you might get a different reaction from your love interest, who (thinks) you’re mad even to talk about children at those ages,” Shaw said in an effort to explain why the average age of starting a family today is 30.

“I think a lot of the issues we’re seeing in societies and particularly in younger people are actually consequences of the reengineering of our societies to deprioritize parenthood,” he said.

Shaw noted that most people aren’t aware of how short a woman’s fertility window is, and this means they can’t make a truly informed choice about whether to delay children, if they are in a position to have children in the first place.

An 84-year-old woman was offered euthanasia as a first option in a Canadian A&E.

Miriam Lancaster has spoken out about her horror at being offered Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) for a fractured sacrum, a bone at the base of the spine, in her first conversation with a doctor. Six weeks later, following treatment, she was able to walk her daughter down the aisle at her wedding.

One in 20 deaths in Canada now occur through its MAID programme.

Miriam shared her experience of being rushed to Vancouver General Hospital after waking up in excruciating pain early last year. She recalled: “Off I went to the Vancouver General Hospital, and I was approached by a young lady doctor. The very first words out of her mouth [were]: ‘We would like to offer you MAID.’

“I was taken aback—that was the last thing on my mind! I just wanted to find out why I was in pain! I did not want to die!”

Four weeks later, she was out of hospital, and in the year since, she has travelled to Cuba, Mexico, and Guatemala.

Another abortionist lie has been exposed! A new study published last week by JAMA Network Open revealed that despite a torrent of press propaganda claiming that pro-life protections threaten the lives of women, maternal mortality rates are actually falling in states that passed strong pro-life laws.

In Texas, for example, the maternal mortality rate fell by 2.4% since the Heartbeat Act passed in 2021; the study found that other states with strong pro-life laws saw a 3.3% drop in maternal mortality.

“The study was comprehensive and methodologically rigorous,” wrote Dr. Michael New, a statistician and senior associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “The authors calculated quarterly maternal mortality rates for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., for the years between 2018 and 2023. Overall, they considered over 22 million births and over 12,000 pregnancy-related deaths.”

“When trends were held constant, states with strong pro-life laws on average actually experienced slightly faster declines in maternal mortality than states with permissive abortion policies.” Conversely, a 2025 study revealed that nearly 11% of women who took the abortion pill experienced complications.

The mainstream press has relentlessly pushed the narrative that pro-life protections for preborn children harm women. The goal is to present the public with a false choice: You can protect preborn children in the womb, or you can protect women — but not both.

That is not the case. The JAMA study, Dr. New noted, “compared maternal mortality rate trends in each of the 14 states that enacted either a heartbeat law or an abortion ban to the cohort of states where abortion remained legal. The results were interesting. Not one of these 14 states experienced a maternal mortality rate increase that was statistically significant.”

Indeed, New noted that in order to make the case that pro-life laws are dangerous for women (while ignoring the presence of preborn human beings altogether), abortion activists have “amplified a Gender Equity Policy Institute analysis that was not peer reviewed and largely focused on a few datapoints from Texas.” The new study actually reviewed data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“No state with a strong pro-life law experienced a statistically significant increase it is maternal mortality rate,” Dr. New told LifeSiteNews by email. “When trends were held constant, states with strong pro-life laws on average actually experienced slightly faster declines in maternal mortality than states with permissive abortion policies.”