FROM the start, ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics were a solution in search of a problem. Politicians and campaigners marketed them as compassionate, but designed them to silence those who were committing no crime or were simply offering help. In Scotland the police admitted there was no evidence of harassment: no arrests, no prosecutions, no threat to public order. The supposed crisis simply did not exist. The only ‘offence’ was that some people still dared to believe that both mother and child have value.
Now north of the border the mask has not only slipped but fallen off completely. Green MSP Patrick Harvie’s amendment to Liam McArthur’s assisted suicide Bill (a Scottish version of Kim Leadbeater’s Bill in Westminster), would impose censorship zones not just around abortion clinics but around every hospital and GP surgery in Scotland. Within these zones, it could become a criminal offence to ‘influence’ anyone’s decision about assisted suicide, however gently or compassionately that influence is expressed.
A doctor expressing moral concern, a nurse questioning whether assisted death is truly a ‘choice’, a psychiatrist railing against suicide promotion, even a poster offering help to someone in despair could all be deemed criminal under Harvie’s proposal.
This is not compassion. It is coercion. It is the state deciding which moral views are acceptable in public life and which must be silenced.
We should have seen it coming. The Greens were never going to stop with abortion. Having silenced one group of people for their beliefs, why would they hesitate to silence another? Once you accept the principle that conscience can be legislated against, there is no end to it.
This amendment is not an isolated proposal. It is part of a deeper shift. Increasingly, we live in a culture that tolerates every view except one that challenges the orthodoxy of death as a ‘solution’. Whether it is abortion, euthanasia or gender ideology, dissent is treated not as disagreement but as danger: something to be monitored, censored and eliminated.
What makes Harvie’s amendment particularly alarming is its reach. The zones he proposes would extend around every GP surgery and hospital in Scotland. That means not just activists but doctors, patients and clergy could find themselves breaking the law simply by speaking their minds, expressing professional or ethical concerns or living their faith.
Imagine a priest visiting a dying parishioner in hospital, offering comfort and reminding them that every life has value. Would that count as ‘influencing’? What about a GP who advises a suicidal patient that there are alternatives, that their life still matters? Or even a Macmillan nurse, advising a patient newly in receipt of a terminal diagnosis that life is not over? The chilling effect on medicine, pastoral care and open debate would be enormous.
We have been here before. Every time a government introduces a restriction on free expression, it insists it is ‘narrow’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘necessary’. And every time, the definition of what is ‘unacceptable’ expands. Speech that was once lawful becomes punishable. Views that were once tolerated become unspeakable.
It always starts with the pro-lifers, because they are the easiest to caricature and the hardest to defend publicly. But it never ends there. The same logic that criminalises a leaflet about help for pregnant women can just as easily criminalise a conversation about assisted suicide, or gender transition or climate policy. The principle is the same: silence the dissenter.
Those who dismiss this as ‘scaremongering’ should consider how quickly our public discourse has narrowed. Twenty years ago, no one would have imagined that praying quietly outside a clinic could lead to arrest, or that a medical professional could be disciplined for declining to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. Yet here we are.
Scotland now stands at a crossroads. The country that once prided itself on moral courage and intellectual independence is on the brink of criminalising compassion for the vulnerable, elderly and disabled patients.
It should alarm anyone, regardless of politics, that parliament might soon decide what can and cannot be said between doctor and patient, or between a priest and the dying. If that does not concern you, it should. Because once conscience is outlawed, freedom follows close behind.
This is not only about pro-lifers, or about Christians, or about one issue. It is about the right to hold a view the state disapproves of; the right to speak the truth as you see it, and where Scotland goes, the so-called progressive left in rest of the UK too often follow.
First they came for the pro-lifer. The rest of us should understand what comes next.
