Abortion clinics will get ‘bubble’
Naqvi promises law requiring protesters to keep their distance
Ontario will have a law limiting protests outside abortion clinics this fall, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi promised Monday.
The Ottawa Centre MPP’s riding includes Ottawa’s Morgentaler Clinic downtown, where protesters carrying placards regularly confront staff and patients. Demonstrators say they’re using their democratic rights to resist a procedure they believe is evil; the clinic workers and women who go there say they’re harassed and sometimes even assaulted.
Some abortion clinics in Ontario have anti-protest “bubble zones” around them set by court injunctions in the 1990s, when Toronto’s Morgentaler Clinic in particular was targeted. In 1992, it was firebombed and was regularly the scene of aggressive confrontations between pro- and anti-abortion activists. It’s among two dozen sites where the nominally temporary judges’ orders still apply.
Ottawa’s clinic wasn’t open then and isn’t covered. Recently the protests outside the Ottawa clinic have got more public attention, and last week Mayor Jim Watson and Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney wrote to Naqvi asking for a provincial law that would expand the restrictions to other clinics.
Naqvi agreed. A woman seeking to have a pregnancy ended is entitled to get that service “without fear of being judged or publicly humiliated because of her choice,” Naqvi said in a news conference at the Centretown Community Health Centre, a few blocks down Bank Street from the Morgentaler Clinic.
This is the last week before the legislature at Queen’s Park takes a summer break, so there’s no chance of getting a law passed quickly. Naqvi said he and his ministry will spend the summer crafting a bill and holding public consultations on it. In general, he said, it’s likely to be modelled on a bubble-zone law in British Columbia that’s been found constitutional by the courts, even though it restricts some people’s freedoms of speech and assembly.
The B.C. law requires the government to spell out — with land-survey maps and diagrams — precisely where protests are permitted around abortion clinics and where they aren’t. Its no-protest zones are small, typically not even covering the sidewalk across the street from a clinic, but that’s enough to let women entering and leaving mix with other people on the block and not be confronted at the door. The law essentially allows police officers to tell protesters within an “access zone” to knock it off or be arrested. It also covers the homes of abortion providers, though it doesn’t extend to private property nearby.
“I think one of the things that we have to be really mindful about in any legislation of this sort is the reach of it, that’s not so broad that it’s struck down as unconstitutional,” Naqvi said.
He pointed out that the 1990s injunctions don’t forbid antiabortion protests outside hospitals, which are large public institutions with multiple entrances.
The Morgentaler Clinic is the only stand-alone clinic in Ottawa that conducts surgical abortions, said Catherine Macnab, the executive director of Planned Parenthood. (They’re also offered in hospitals.) New-to-Canada drugs that effect “medical abortions” are likely to change that landscape by allowing individual doctors to prescribe pharmaceuticals for women to use in private, not at a clinic.
“This isn’t about abortion, or life. It’s about freedom,” said Frank Barrett, who said in a phone interview Monday that he’s protested outside the Ottawa clinic an hour each Tuesday for eight years. He’s also the person who got a pro-life flag hoisted outside city hall in mid-May.
Barrett holds a sandwich board across the street, he said, with a baby’s image on it and the words: “Face it. Abortion kills.” He’s aware of one protester who entered the clinic and was arrested for mischief. Otherwise, he said, the protests are peaceful — no assaults, no spitting, no pattern of abuse.
“These things that have been said about the abortuary, they’ve never been investigated in the true sense of the word,” Barrett said. “To my knowledge … there’s been nothing wrong, they’ve not been investigated.”
Another protester stands close to the clinic door with more disturbing images purporting to be of an aborted fetus. Barrett isn’t a fan of his, he said, though they’re on the same side of the issue.
“I can see people’s problem with this guy in front of the abortuary. I can see people’s problem with the pictures he has,” Barrett said.
“They are disgusting, because abortion is disgusting as far as I’m concerned.”
But Barrett argues that being made uncomfortable isn’t the same as being assaulted.
In the meantime, nothing will change about enforcing existing laws on assault and harassment outside the Bank Street clinic. It takes a report alleging a violation of the law to get the police involved. There are bylaws covering major demonstrations that impede traffic, but they don’t really apply to a handful of protesters on a sidewalk.
The city has a duty to ensure women’s safety as they seek a legally protected, publicly funded medical procedure, Watson said,
but won’t step up beyond what it’s already doing.
“I’ve spoken to the chief on this and he’s assured me that if harassment continues, individuals are to call 911 and the police will get there as soon as possible,” Watson said. “We can’t have a police officer standing at the clinic 24 hours a day — that’s just not practical.”
That’s not great, said Shayna Hodson, the Ottawa clinic’s director.
“Legislation will take some time, and now that the protesters also know that they are working on a solution that will remove their ability to protest directly outside the clinic, it will increase the threat, risk, violence and aggression outside the clinic,
while there is still no interim solution,” she wrote in an email to the Citizen.
Nobody was protesting in the driving rain outside the Morgentaler clinic on Monday, a day when the clinic doesn’t schedule patient appointments.