JD Vance may disagree, but this anti-abortion activist isn't a brutally censored dissident

The US vice-president's avid concern for Livia Tossici-Bolt's conviction is plain sinister

- Catherine Bennett

You know the feeling: you're feeling sociable, why wouldn't you make a sign saying "Here to talk, if you want to", and head for a spot outside the nearest abortion clinic? And why wouldn't some of its arriving patients want to pause before their appointments and satisfy your entirely innocent interest in their reproductive intentions?

This, give or take, amounted to the case by the prominent anti-abortion campaigner, Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was on Friday found guilty of twice breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO). Her sign-holding outside a Bournemouth abortion clinic was, she had argued, not covered by a council-imposed safe zone, being "a mere invitation to speak". And thus an invitation she could have happily extended to strangers just a little further from the clinic. But that did not suit Tossici-Bolt's purpose. Nor does anything prevent her from staging anti-abortion rallies, distributing literature, or expressing her views on abortion anywhere except right in abortion patients' faces outside clinics. These details, although similar regulations exist in parts of the US, routinely fail to surface in accounts by her prominent US supporters, with whose help Tossici-Bolt has been misrepresenting the illegal undermining of UK women's reproductive rights as a noble quest for free speech.

Joining with JD Vance, and US anti-abortion pressure group Alliance Defending Freedom (whose UK arm supported her legal defence), a bureau within the US State Department generously took time away from domestic free speech crises to send a delegation to meet Tossici-Bolt. It then tweeted what was generally understood as menacing, that it was "monitoring" her case. "It is important that the UK respect and protect freedom of expression." A similar admonition, tagging those twin objects of Trump's esteem, Putin and Viktor Orbán, is expected any time.