LONDON — A high attendance at the U.K. March for Life on Saturday, coupled with the most intense visible counterdemonstrations by pro-abortion protesters witnessed at the annual event, shows that life issues are becoming a central focus of British public life, the pro-life event’s founder has said.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who serves as the march’s co-director, observed “certainly more opposition” than in previous marches, including a group that disrupted the march’s opening Mass in Westminster Cathedral and had to be forcibly removed.
The protesters, most of them masked, then accompanied much of the rally, chanting through loud hailers and deliberately making noise to drown out pro-life speakers. London’s Metropolitan Police were criticized for allowing them to protest in close proximity and to have a location in Parliament Square directly in front of the March for Life stage, where they caused further noise and disruption and provoked bystanders.
But Vaughan-Spruce told the Register that she did not see the protests in themselves as “necessarily a bad thing” because she took them to be “an indication that abortion is becoming more of a live public issue.”
“For too long there’s been an extraordinary complacency surrounding abortion in Britain,” she said. “It has been
