Anoteworthy case out of Great Britain could provide Americans with an object lesson from our mother country on the radicalization of modern abortion advocates. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a Christian woman who was arrested twice for silently praying outside an abortion facility, has been awarded £13,000 and an apology from the West Midlands Police.

Alliance Defending Freedom UK supported Vaughan-Spruce’s legal defense which resulted in exoneration from the criminal charges. She then issued a claim against West Midlands Police for wrongful arrests and false imprisonments, assault and battery concerning an intrusive search of her person, and a breach of her human rights in 2022 and 2023. Vaughan-Spruce said in a statement: “Silent prayer is not a crime. Nobody should be arrested merely for the thoughts they have in their heads — yet this happened to me twice at the hands of the West Midlands Police, who explicitly told me that ‘prayer is an offence’.”

Before Americans look down our noses at our distant cousins across the Atlantic and begin our “George Orwell must be turning in his grave” chastising, we should look to our own affairs.

In Detroit, Mich., a group of Christian pro-life advocates were convicted of conspiracy against rights and violations of the FACE Act. Among those convicted for protesting outside the Northland Family Planning Clinic in Sterling Heights, Mich., was Eva Edl, an 89-year-old survivor of a communist prison camp in Eastern Europe. She now faces up to ten years in prison.

The Biden–Harris administration has been applying the conspiracy-against-rights charge, which was originally crafted to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan, against pro-life advocates. President Joe Biden originally campaigned for the U.S. Senate as a pro-life Democrat. Now, his administration is spending the twilight of his political career targeting people expressing the same beliefs he once did. It adds another somber note to a bereft swan song.

In New York, ADF attorneys representing the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, Gianna’s House, and Options Care Center are suing New York AG Letitia James for abusing her authority by censoring pro-life pregnancy centers because they tell women about the option of using progesterone for abortion-pill reversal. Progesterone is a safe and naturally occurring hormone that can often be successfully used to counteract the life-ending effects of abortion drugs when taken in time.

James recently sued eleven faith-based pro-life pregnancy centers and a network of affiliated centers in the state, alleging — despite evidence to the contrary — that the centers are spreading “false and misleading” information about this progesterone treatment. She is unlawfully targeting pro-life pregnancy centers, threatening punishment for promoting and offering a service that gives women the choice of changing their minds regarding their pregnancies.

Multiple studies support the information the centers wish to provide women. A woman’s body uses progesterone naturally to sustain pregnancy, and medical professionals have used it for decades to prevent miscarriage and forestall preterm labor safely and effectively. Yet the attorney general has targeted centers that tell women about this option because of the centers’ pro-life viewpoints and the content of their speech. New York’s message is clear: There is only one choice the state will accept for women who have taken abortion drugs, and it results in the death of a child.

Pro-life advocates often disagree on the tactics, strategy, and legal theory to best protect life. Yet their core principle has remained relatively unchanged for the last half-century: Every human life is sacred, bearing the image of the Creator, full of potential, and worthy of protection from its beginning to natural end.

By contrast, these cases, both at home and abroad, demonstrate how far afield the other side has wandered on the issue. It is using the “reproductive freedom” label to cover the drastic shift from pro-choice to pro-abortion, from advocating their position to criminalizing the advocacy of any other position. Those who once claimed abortion should be safe, legal, and rare had a mobile abortion-pill dispensary and vasectomy facility parked outside the convention center where they formally nominated their candidate for president of the United States.

William F. Buckley Jr. once described conservatives as standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” As abortion advocates “progress” to the most radical position imaginable on an issue for which many Americans are searching for a reasonable solution, there is apparently no Buckley on their side to yell “Stop!” For the sake of the nation, they should find one, quickly.