Polly Vernon has her say
THE AMERICAN-FUNDED anti-abortion movement 40 Days For Life is poised to restart its now annual campaign against a woman’s right to make up our own damn mind about what happens within our own damn bodies by protesting outside abortion clinics all over this country for the next… you guessed it: 40 days.
The Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, meanwhile, got an early start on things, having set themselves up outside my local abortion provider in Finsbury Park, north London, for the last few weeks. They spend their time shouting, ‘We love you!’ at clinic clients who are attempting to go about their own, desperately private, business; because – guys! Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a flagrant attempt to shame a woman you don’t know in the street, by drawing attention to her situation at the precise moment she is, at best, feeling a little queasy/rather nervy and, at worst, in a state of out-and-out crisis. Nothing at all.
BPAS – the British Pregnancy Advisory Service – is campaigning for buffer zones outside abortion clinics, 100m public service protection orders (PSPOS) within which people are forbidden from gathering and protesting in this way. Which seems like the very least the Government could do – only: it hasn’t. While 34 clinics and hospitals across the country have reported demonstrations outside their facilities in the last year, the Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London is, to date, the only abortion provider in the country to have a PSPO. In 2018, Sajid Javid – then Home Secretary – rejected calls to impose further buffer zones following a consultation. Then, in October last year, a coalition of health providers, charities and medical bodies wrote to Priti Patel to urge her to reconsider Javid’s findings. She hasn’t done this yet, so 40 Days For Life and The Helpers of God’s Precious Infants may carry on with their obstructive and intimidating distributing of literature emblazoned with erroneous intel about how abortion is linked to breast cancer, drug abuse, alcoholism and eating disorders (it definitely isn’t); and so on.
God, I find it weird. When I had my abortions – yes, that’s abortions plural, there were three of them; yes, there were good reasons for each, there always is; no, I have not experienced a moment’s shame or regret for any of them – in the 1990s, no one gathered outside the clinics to stop me. No one shouted at me, showed me images of butchered foetuses, told me they loved me when they clearly did not, or shoved leaflets filled with printed lies into my clammy hands. It was such a long time ago and yet it seems so progressive, compared to the poisonous pantomime currently unfurling outside the UK’S abortion providers. Like it was a sort of fantasy abortion experience, as opposed to the unfettered access to standard healthcare it actually was.