Last week, a young Dutch woman was arrested outside an abortion clinic in Utrecht in the Netherlands. Thirty-five weeks pregnant herself, she had offered leaflets to two people; one took a brochure, the other declined. The police arrived and, without evidence, arrested the woman on fictitious allegations of “disturbing the peace.” It was the ninth recent arrest made for peacefully engaging in pro-life outreach outside an abortion facility, even though it is not against the law to do so.
It is the third arrest for the young woman—who chose to remain unidentified—and at times she has been held in jail for three to six hours. Two other Dutch women have been similarly arrested three times each. Dirkje de Ruiter, for example, was arrested last year outside a clinic in Utrecht before she had even passed out a single leaflet; the police informed her that, despite doing nothing illegal, her mere presence constituted “disorder.”
De Ruiter had been previously arrested in Rotterdam; a couple turned away from the clinic as the officers were confronting her. “When I arrived at the police station, all my things had to be handed in, and I was put in a cell measuring 2 metres by 1.5 metres,” she told me. “Some of my clothes had to come off, and I was given a blanket against the cold. In the cell I thanked God for the life that had been saved… I was not afraid.” Again: De Ruiter had not broken any laws.
The arrests of citizens doing peaceful pro-life outreach in the Netherlands are part of a broader continental crackdown on social conservatives, usually Christian, for expressing their beliefs in public. In Brussels earlier this month, Lois McLatchie of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and Chris Elston, the anti-trans ideology activist known to his social media followers as “Billboard Chris,” were arrested, strip-searched, and detained for hours by police merely for holding signs reading “Children Are Never Born In The Wrong Body” and “Children Cannot Consent To Puberty Blockers.” Their signs were destroyed. They were charged with no crime.
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