What is America doing meddling in the abortion clinic case? - David Behrens

It was an odd place to start a cultural war over civil liberties. Russia might have been a better target. Or Syria. How about China?

But no: for the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, the front line on free speech ran through Poole Magistrates’ Court. That was where an outspoken anti-abortion campaigner named Livia Tossici-Bolt was convicted of twice breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order by waving her dubious ‘invitation to speak’ in the faces of women and families at perhaps the most distressing moment of their lives.

Her conviction was “disappointing”, sniffed the US Bureau. “Freedom of expression must be protected for all.” It was an extraordinary intervention in the normal legal process of a fellow democracy.

But freedom of speech includes the freedom to be left alone. And here was someone insensitively invading the space of women suffering a deep personal tragedy. It was as awful as gatecrashing a funeral.

Livia Tossici-Bolt had tried to circumvent the law by arguing that she was not demonstrating, merely offering to talk – or to hector, browbeat or bully; call it what you like. In fact she was indulging in the worst kind of bible-bashing. She could have stood with all the cranks, shouting into the wind outside the shops on a Saturday morning, but instead she flaunted her passive-aggressive self-righteousness in what should have been a place of sanctuary.

The patients with whom she sought to converse will have been enduring an agonising dialogue of their own: weighing the lifelong commitment to a little one conceived out of love and out of luck: too expensive to feed or clothe; a burden, not a blessing. Who would cruelly condemn a child to a life like that? Someone like Mrs Tossici-Bolt, that’s who: a meddler carrying the placard but not the responsibility.

Abortion ceased to be an election topic in Britain three decades ago. A woman’s right to choose is now enshrined in law and in life and no politician of any persuasion is seriously suggesting that we return to the underworld of the back-street abortionist.

But the US is different. Abortion rights remain deeply divisive and to a State Department now controlled by fundamentalists like Vice-President JD Vance, cases like the one in Dorset are weapons in the war for the soul of America.

Two months ago Vance made an ill-informed, gun-infused speech accusing the UK of putting “basic liberties of religious Britons … in the crosshairs”, just for placing buffer zones around abortion clinics so patients wouldn't have to suffer campaigners conflating freedom of speech with harassment.

Vance is a pot-stirrer and Livia Tossici-Bolt his puppet. His rhetoric about what he insidiously calls “threats from within” is calculated to frighten his religiously-fuelled supporters back home.

We know how it goes: “They’re eating the dogs”, “they’re stamping out religion” – these are tropes from the same playbook. They have no basis in truth; they’re just there to ramp up fear about cultural forces working against the common good.

Of course, the more immediate threats to civilisation are Vance and his boss and their demonisation of those who don’t share their worldview. Thus, interfering busybodies like Livia Tossici-Bolt can be made heroes of an imaginary revolution.

Britain did not punish her for her insensitivity; she walked away with just a conditional discharge. And her £20,000 court costs will be covered by her American backers so she has little incentive not to go on upsetting grieving families.

She left the courtroom muttering about a “dark day for Britain” but her lenient treatment says more about our enlightened administration of justice and preservation of free speech than any of the poisoned rhetoric from across the Atlantic.

We used to think our language and common legal heritage connected us to the US as inseparably as members of a family – but today our special relationship exists only metaphorically, like the one between Prince Harry and his father, or Trump and the truth. None of it passes the sniff test.