Should pro-life campaigners really be banned from protesting outside abortion clinics?
That’s what is happening in Ealing next week — and the rest of the UK is set to follow. ANNE ATKINS talks to both sides in this explosively emotive battle
PALE pink blossom drifts in the air as relaxed young mothers push children and prams to the park along a spacious, tree-lined avenue.
You would barely notice the tarnished plaque on a Victorian mansion, bearing the name of Marie Stopes, unless you were looking for it.
In fact, it might slip your attention entirely were it not for an assorted group of people outside. They include a grandmother wrapped up against the afternoon chill, a greying elderly man in neatly pressed trousers and a tall young woman in a knitted red beanie hat.
One has brought a folding chair, another a wheel-along shopper and laundry bag. A few are clutching pink and blue rosary beads and a handful of leaflets.
In front of them on the grass is a collection of wooden placards and banners. ‘Pregnant? need Help?’ asks one, while another is more to the point: ‘Love Them Both’ it declares.
Only then, do you know where you are. This is the group (they don’t see themselves as protesters, and describe their presence as a vigil) in Ealing, West London, currently at the centre of a national campaign to introduce so-called ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics. Several local councils have resolved to bring in Public Space Protection Orders (or PSPOs) around abortion facilities, banning pro-Life groups from coming within 100metres of the clinic and approaching those entering it.
Ealing Council was the first to vote for a ban, which comes into force next week, and it has been followed by others around the UK.
PSPOs are essentially like Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) for public spaces south of the Border. They have typically been used to address local problems like street drinking, begging or dog fouling. But what are the antisocial issues being stamped out outside this Marie Stopes clinic?
during its consultation process, Ealing Council heard allegations from pro-Choice support groups, of women seeking abortions being chased down the street and called murderers, of plastic foetuses being thrust into hands and distressed women being reduced to tears by strangers begging them to ‘give their unborn baby a birthday’. These claims are strenuously disputed by the pro-Life group, the Good Counsel network, which says there’s no evidence of this from the clinic’s CCTV, or recordings from pro-Choice protesters.
The Ealing clinic welcomed the council’s decision, which they say is long overdue.
richard Bentley, managing director at Marie Stopes UK said: ‘This is a landmark decision for women. We are incredibly grateful to Ealing Council for recognising the emotional distress that these groups create and for taking proportionate action to protect the privacy and dignity of women accessing our clinic.
‘This was never about protest. It was about small groups of strangers choosing to gather by our entrance gates where they could harass and intimidate women and prevent them from accessing healthcare to which they are legally entitled.
‘Ealing Council has sent a clear message that this kind of behaviour should not be tolerated and these groups have no justification for trying to involve themselves in one of the most personal decisions a woman can make.’
It should be pointed out that also included in the 100 metre ban are the pro-Choice supporters, with their ‘Her Body, Her Choice’ and ‘Every Child a Wanted Child’ slogans.
But civil liberties campaigners question whether stopping a group from expressing an opinion — either for or against — in a particular public area is tantamount to state censorship.
And watching this group of people, quietly handing out leaflets this week, I couldn’t help thinking that those who see this council ban as an attack on free speech have a point.
Because whatever we may think about abortion, surely many who value our tradition of free assembly and expression will feel uneasy about the silencing of these campaigners who wait out in all weathers in a bid, as they see it, to ‘help’.
The help they offer is financial assistance and accommodation to women who feel they have no choice but to abort due to personal circumstances. This, they argue, is not changing a mind or haranguing a woman for her choice, but pointing out to her she does have options.
My own opinions on abortion are far from clear-cut. I remember, in my 20s, watching in horror the 1984 antiabortion film The Silent Scream, which showed a termination in graphic detail. My Christian faith was incidental to what seemed to me a human rights issue.
Yet I would never claim the certainty of telling others what to do: even with a stable home and adored children, I have experienced the terror of an unexpected pregnancy . . . and the greater dread of believing I carried a disabled child, with two already disabled.
I feel sympathy with both sides of the debate. Intimidating vulnerable women is unacceptable. But I value free speech so highly that I feel uncomfortable with the 100metre exclusion zone.
On the day of my visit, the campaigners seemed entirely peaceful and well-meaning, although it took a great deal of persuasion and reassurance that I had no particular axe to grind to get them to put their case.
While we talked one woman in her mid-30s emerged from the clinic, her blonde hair scraped into a ponytail, looking at her telephone. She refused a leaflet, saw a man waiting in a car and, happy and laughing, got in.
Another pretty young black woman walked into the clinic with a friend. ‘Oh,’ she smiled when offered a leaflet. ‘Thanks.’ no harassment here, it seems.
Yet every other day, the group tell me, they suffer assaults, from their leaflets being torn up to their posters being kicked to pieces. Such is the level of abuse, they say, that the police have suggested they put up a notice advising passers-by that what they are doing is still legal — until Monday.
Suddenly I heard a raised, angry voice and assumed one of the proLifers was objecting to my presence, but no: a member of staff came out of the clinic and is shouting at one of the leaflet holders. ‘You aren’t supposed to be here!’ It was the first act of aggression I witnessed.
The 82-year-old grandmother explains her reasons for her vigil. ‘Some of these women visiting the clinic are under terrible pressure,’ she says. ‘They may have been trafficked, or suffered violence, or been left by partners. Cross my heart, if I die tonight, I have never once witnessed any harassment. We just offer support in a crisis. And if we’re moved, we won’t be able to help.’
The question of ‘help’ is, perhaps, the crux of this explosively divisive issue. The Good Counsel network claims their presence at the clinic door has resulted in over 500 women being enabled to keep their babies, although the pro-Choice group disputes this.
Vigil member Clare tells me: ‘In five years, 536 mothers visiting the Ealing Marie Stopes have been enabled to keep their babies — 20 sent testimonies to the Council. Eight stepped forward at Ealing Town Hall when the exclusion zone was discussed. They were simply airbrushed out.’
She described a woman called Betty, who attended that council meeting with her son, Isaiah. ‘She was so overcome she was on her knees,’ says Clare. ‘She was reported in the local press as, “pro-Lifer escorted out.” ’
CLArE won’t tell me her age or how many children she has, saying: ‘We get so much abuse. People could easily track me down. I was thrown out of my book group when they found out. I’d never once mentioned abortion in the ten years I’d been a member. They tried to re-educate me. When that failed, two said it was like being with a member of the KKK, closed the club and restarted it without me.’
Her frustration at being silenced is palpable. ‘Sister Supporter [the group campaigning for the buffer zone] are all middle class, privileged, comfortable,’ she says. ‘What do they know about choice? The women we help are poor, dispossessed, with broken English and no choices.’
So can such groups really change minds?
One mother told the Mail how grateful she is for the help she was offered by pro-Lifers when she entered an abortion clinic in London in 2011.
Alina dulgheriu, a 34-year-old student from London, now joins vigils with the Be Here For Me organisation, which offers support for pregnant women who want to keep their babies.
‘It was 2011, and I found myself three weeks pregnant. My partner of three years made it very clear that he would not support me if I had the baby. I was heartbroken. I wanted the baby but I knew that I could not support myself. I was working as a nanny at the time and my employer sacked me when he found out I was expecting.
‘I was crying my eyes out when I got to the clinic. As I approached it a lady and man were standing outside with leaflets, there was no aggression, no shouting. She just handed me a leaflet saying they could offer financial help if I kept the baby, and they would help me if I reconsidered.
‘My mind was all over the place and I turned around and got back on the bus to go home. They gave me a place to stay and provided me with everything I needed for the arrival of my baby. They never asked for anything in return.
‘When my daughter, Sarah, arrived, I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was and how I’d almost got rid of her. When she was three, I went to the organisation and said I’d like to pay them back in some way. They didn’t want anything, but said I could help by joining them outside the clinics. So that’s what I did.’
Yet it’s hard to ignore the voice of Anna Veglio-White, founder of Sister Supporter, who presented the 3,600 signature petition to Ealing Council. Aged 25, she has lived in Ealing all her life, and founded the group after coming back to Ealing after university and realising what was happening on her doorstep.
‘This is such a historic moment,’ she says. ‘Fifty years on from the Abortion Act, this is probably the biggest thing to happen in reproductive rights in the UK and it’s happened in Ealing first. This is the first step of many because it needs a national solution. We receive a lot of messages from women who have shared their experience with us and there’s one that really sticks out. She said that she had come to terms with her decision, but suffered PTSD after she was chased down the road and called a “murderer”. And ten years on, she’s still traumatised.
‘Families are affected, too. We invited the councillors down to the clinic and one of them was a woman whose son is autistic. He’d walked past all those gruesome pictures of foetuses and had become so distressed that he had to have therapy. Obviously she couldn’t walk him down that road any more.
‘It was something we were hearing from a lot of families who didn’t want to walk their young children down that route and have a conversation they weren’t ready to have... so they were taking their kids the long way around. They now have the freedom to walk down that road again.’
SHE also disputes the Good Network Counsel’s claims to have saved women from terminations. ‘No one has ever said to us that they have turned away from the clinic as a result of these antiabortion groups,’ she says. ‘All the people we have met have never seen anyone turn away so their claims of being able to turn 500 women away have never been substantiated. Whereas we’ve been able to get hundreds of witness statements to substantiate our claims.’
One thing is clear, this argument, which has been waging since the introduction of the 1967 Abortion Act, is not going to go away. Maybe the doorstep of an abortion clinic is NOT the place to be having it.
As I leave I am approached by local resident James Tilley, 47. He said how he had signed the petition to get the group moved on ‘from a moral standpoint’, then went on to tell me a story about a friend of his who had an abortion. The father was unsupportive; she couldn’t afford a child — and was scarred for life. He says those standing vigil should liaise with the clinic — maybe be given a meeting room, a place where women can talk about alternatives.
He has a point. If Marie Stopes really cares about women not just profit, and if Sister Supporter is really fighting for choice and not just motivated by politics, collaboration must surely be the answer.
Otherwise the one incontrovertible tragedy in this sorry tale is not only that of free speech, but also of much-wanted babies not being allowed to be born, because their mothers didn’t know help was available. That is a tragedy indeed.