Abortion protest ban

sir – You report (April 10) that “protests” outside the Marie Stopes abortion clinic in Ealing, west London, are to be “banned in an effort to stop women and staff from being harassed and intimidated”, with local councillors voting for a “buffer zone” – a Public Space Protection Order.

All pro-life vigils pray and offer help and information upon request to women seeking abortion. There have been no reports of intimidation and no police intervention.

Even if there were a genuine case of harassment at the Ealing clinic, there are already legal provisions to forestall such activity, introduced to prevent attacks on scientific premises by protesters against animal experimentation. Perhaps the reason that Ealing and other councils have not introduced these measures is that they can be applied by judges only after seeing evidence of harassment – and there is none.

Campaigners seem so eager to silence the pro-life point of view that they seem not to care about the implications for restricting the mark of a free country – free speech.

Ealing’s Labour MP Rupa Huq has been leading a parliamentary campaign “to impose buffer zones around family planning clinics nationally”. It seems that the “buffer zone” campaign is an attempt to normalise abortion.

When an operation that involves killing rather than saving life is reduced to a bureaucratic procedure, we hear echoes of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Ann Farmer

Woodford Green, Essex

sir – Is it acceptable that any organisation creates a space in a public location in this country where freedom of speech is denied, especially when the matter concerns life and death?

Universities have tried it, now councils. Expressing a genuine argued opinion, even if one disagrees with it, must always be allowed. Jonathan Longstaff

Buxted, East Sussex