LIVERPOOL, England (OSV News) -- The British army veteran prosecuted for silently praying in front of an abortion clinic was, to his own surprise, caught in the global spotlight when his case was cited by U.S. Vice President JD Vance in a Feb. 14 speech at a landmark security conference in Munich.
While the speech sent tectonic waves throughout Europe, Adam Smith-Connor told OSV News he is glad that someone in power has finally stood up in defence of ordinary people.
Speaking to OSV News Feb. 19, Smith-Connor, who recently converted to the Catholic faith from evangelical Protestantism, said he was “grateful” that Vance raised his case when he warned Europe about retreating from freedom.
Smith-Connor, 51, said: “The speech was glorious, frankly, and not just the bit about me but the whole thing.”
A court convicted the married father of two from Hampshire of violating a “buffer zone” around an abortion clinic on Oct. 16, 2024. He was arrested in November 2022 for praying silently outside the clinic where a public space protection order was in place.
The British government put “buffer zones” around all abortion clinics, a move that saw Christians arrested for offering private prayers.
The legislation, contained in the Public Order Act 2023, came into full force Oct. 31, 2024, criminalizing a range of activities within 492 feet, or 150 meters, of an abortion facility.
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council spent more than 90,000 pounds ($113,000) of public funds prosecuting Smith-Connor for what some politicians have described as a “thought crime”.
He was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay costs of 9,000 pounds ($11,300) and a maximum penalty of 1,000 pounds ($1,260), but he has announced that he will take his case to the Court of Appeal. A three-day hearing will take place starting July 28.
Activities violating the “buffer zones” potentially include prayer, thought, peaceful presence, consensual communication and offers of practical support to women in vulnerable situations, should any of these be deemed to influence or interfere with access to the clinic.
Smith-Connor was prosecuted after he prayed silently outside an abortion clinic for three minutes.
The severity of the legislation partly prompted Vance to warn European leaders that the greatest threat to the security of the West comes not from Russia or China but “from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values -- values shared with the United States of America.”
“When I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners,” he said in his Feb. 14 speech.
“And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs,” Vance said.
“A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes -- not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own,” the U.S. vice president said.
Commenting on the words of the second most powerful man in the United States, Smith-Connor said, “I felt like finally someone in authority, in power, was listening to the man on the street.
“For the last few years it feels like the people in power just sneer down their noses at the man on the street as if they are thinking ‘those plebs down there have their own ideas and we have to do everything in our power to suppress them.’”
He said if he ever had “the privilege of meeting Vance,” also a Catholic, he would say: “Thank you, and your analysis is spot on.”
Smith-Connor added: “Our society is in very serious difficulties. Britain has always stood for freedom ever since the Magna Carta, which restricted the power of the king and gave rights to his subjects,” he said of the 1215 document.
“Ever since then we have always had a sense of freedom and during the Empire we sent that around the world. The American Constitution is derived from it” Smith-Connor told OSV News.
“But we have got to a place where we are prosecuting people for praying. We are forgetting our foundational principles.”
Vance told the participants at the Munich conference -- in a room packed with presidents, prime ministers, foreign affairs secretaries and think tank analysts -- that “after British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son.”
Smith-Connor told OSV News that he was 28 years old and briefly in a relationship with a girlfriend when she became pregnant, and he agreed to take her for an abortion.
He said they split up soon afterward and, as an atheist, he was for many years untroubled by the abortion. It was only after he became an evangelical that it played on his conscience and he began to pray for the child he aborted -- in atonement for his sin.
He said his conversion to Catholicism came after further study of the Bible. It convinced him of the truth of the Catholic Church’s theology and he said he could not escape the conviction that the Virgin Mary is the woman foretold in the Book of Genesis as bruising the serpent’s head and who is also described in the Book of Revelation.
