A 74-year-old woman, Rose Docherty, has been arrested and charged under Scotland’s abortion 'buffer zone' law in the first example so far of its enforcement just days after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance condemned the law.
GLASGOW, Scotland (LifeSiteNews) – A 74-year-old Scottish woman has been arrested and charged under Scotland’s abortion “buffer zone” law in the first example so far of the law’s enforcement.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Rose Docherty was recently filmed being confronted by police while standing silently outside the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, holding a sign with the message: “Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.”
Video footage showed officers telling her she was “conducting a silent vigil” that was a crime under the so-called Safe Access Zones Act, which took effect in September 2024 and establishes 200-meter (656-foot) “buffer zones” around abortion centers in Scotland. The law prohibits behavior considered likely to “influence someone’s private decision to use abortion services, prevent or get in the way of someone using abortion services (or) harass or distress someone trying to use abortion services.”
On Wednesday, the BBC reported that Docherty has now been arrested and charged with violating the law.
"The protests that have taken place outside Queen Elizabeth have been utterly shameful and I am grateful to Police Scotland for acting so quickly,” declared Scottish Greens MSP Gillian Mackay, the law’s author. "This kind of intimidation has no place in a modern or progressive Scotland. Everybody deserves to have access to health care without harassment."
The arrest came just days after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance condemned the British government’s 2022 arrest of pro-lifer Adam Smith-Connor for silently praying outside an abortion facility under a similar buffer law, and the Scottish government for “distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called ‘safe access zones’ warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.”
Scottish officials “said no letters had been sent out saying people couldn't pray in their homes,” according to the BBC. However, LifeSite has a screenshot of one such letter that states “activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area between the protected premises and the boundary of a Zone could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”
