(LifeSiteNews) — Claire Brennan, a 54-year-old mother of four, appeared Monday in Coleraine Magistrate’s Court in Northern Ireland on three charges under the Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act. She is charged with three counts of “doing an act inside a safe access zone” outside Coleraine’s Causeway Hospital in September, October, and November. The Causeway Hospital commits abortions.
Brennan hails from Doneyshiel Road in Rasharkin, and court documents claim that she protested “with the intent of, or being reckless as to whether, it had the effect of causing harassment, alarm, or distress in connection with the protected person attending premises for a purpose mentioned in Section 3 of the Abortion Services Act.” Three women are named in the charges.
Brennan was first arrested for praying outside the hospital in October 2023 with fellow pro-lifer David Hall, who uses a wheelchair. She was praying the Lord’s Prayer and holding a rosary a month after the Abortion Services Act — which criminalizes pro-life protest within 150 meters of locations where abortions are committed — came into effect. Police officers asked her to move. Brennan responded that she had “a moral duty to stay here and pray.”
One officer told her she was being “really stubborn and ignorant,” and both Brennan and Hall were arrested and charged.
“It is a deeply disturbing law which tells free citizens that they will be arrested if they pray,” Brennan said in 2024. “The expansion of abortion services in Northern Ireland in recent years has been appalling. Our laws, beliefs, and culture on upholding and protecting life in this country have been trampled on. If we are not free to express prayer against abortion outside of a clinic without being criminalized, then none of us are free.”
Brennan was ultimately convicted of conducting an illegal protest and is currently appealing that conviction. (Hall admitted guilt.) In what Christian Concern, which is supporting Brennan, called “an unprecedented development,” Brennan successfully petitioned for the recusal of presiding County Court Judge Ciaran Moynagh when his extensive history of abortion activism came to light.
“I am a Christian and I am a pro-life activist, so it is my moral duty to stand in the gap for the least of the little ones and to defend their rights, their rights to live,” Brennan previously told the court. “No man can touch what is sacred and no human being on earth has the right to take life because it is sacred.”
In December, 76-year-old retired pastor Clive Johnston went on trial at Coleraine Magistrate’s Court for preaching a sermon on a passage from the Gospel of John at the edge of the buffer zone outside the same hospital. He has been charged with two offenses against the Abortion Services Act, even though he did not mention abortion and spoke only on the text “for God so loved the world.”
Brennan’s next court appearance on the three charges is scheduled for February 2, and her appeal is similarly due to be heard later in 2026.
