Buffer zone plan to stop harassment at clinic moves closer
ON a quiet street in south Manchester, a war is being waged.
The Marie Stopes clinic, in Fallowfield, has offered safe and legal abortions for more than a decade.
Inside the building are staff who want to provide a safe haven for women.
Outside is an uninvited welcoming committee of ‘pro-life’ protestors. They come from as far away as Glasgow to wait and frustrate the work of the women inside.
Some do it politely, praying in the street before quietly going home. Others are menacing.
Staff have become used to shrieks of ‘murderer,’ promises of judgement in hell, pushing and shoving, chilling gestures like a finger run across the throat, or finding their tyres popped with nails.
It’s the patients who the protesters are really there for though. A woman, seen walking to the door, will be faced with judgemental placards, brought by the pro-lifers.
Some will approach, question and challenge her about the decision she has summoned up the courage to make.
She might even be confronted by a protester breastfeeding her baby in a pointed way. Or a rubber doll, meant to represent a foetus.
At a time when they are struggling with one of the most difficult decisions of their life, women using the clinic have this gauntlet to run, one designed to inspire or reinforce guilt.
The small, but persistent number who gather outside the clinic each week claim they are offering women the chance to ‘save a life.’
Their numbers are about to swell.
Yesterday campaigners from across the country were expected to descend on Fallowfield for the start of a 40-day protest.
The internationally coordinated campaign - led by Texas-based prayer group ‘40 Days for Life’ aims to ‘end abortion locally through prayer and fasting, community outreach and a peaceful all-day vigil in front of abortion businesses.’
At the same time the council has launched an eight-week consultation about a proposed ‘buffer zone’ outside the clinic, enforced by a Public Space Protection Order.
“Some are nicer than others,” Lyn Bradley, says. of the protesters.
The healthcare support worker has been at the clinic for eight years and remembers them being there the whole time.
“There’s one young man who stands and says prayers and leaves”, she adds.
“The other end of the scale are two chaps who shout real verbal abuse. “One man came in here with his partner and he had a rubber doll in his hand.
“He said that the people outside had told him to keep it because it was ‘a souvenir of my baby I’m losing today.’” Another pro-life campaigner chased, ‘grabbed and pushed’ Lyn in the back, when she first starting working there, before running her finger, menacingly across her neck. “I’m used to them now,” Lyn adds. “They don’t bother me but it’s very different for the ladies. These people don’t know a woman’s circumstances. “Saying they’re going to go to the devil and giving them dolls. It’s scary.”
Last year Ealing council made history by imposing a 100-metre buffer zone banning activists from protesting or ‘harassing’ women outside the town’s Marie Stopes abortion clinic.
Jessica Jones, a nurse at the Fallowfield clinic, hopes a similar scheme here in Manchester will protect the women who use the facility.
She too has got used to ‘the singing, leaflets, banners, grotesque props shoved in your face, being called a murderer and told I’m going to hell.’
But, like all the staff, it’s the patients she worries for most.
“Why are we allowing vulnerable women to be victimised?”, she says.
“People are being met at the door with these banners and made to feel awful about themselves, about using a legal service.”
Some women who use the service are victims of domestic violence, trafficking or rape, Jessica tells us.
This isn’t an argument that the two men who sit on deckchairs opposite the clinic, surrounded by signs with Bible quotations, will accept.
One of the pair, the Reverend Stephen Holland, a minister at Westhoughton Evangelical