Rose Docherty is a 74-year-old grandmother, living in Glasgow. Last month, she stood outside a hospital where abortions were being performed with a sign that read: “Coercion is a crime. Here to talk. Only if you want.”
She was arrested under Scotland’s buffer zone laws and is awaiting a decision on whether she will be fined up to £10,000 for her troubles.
Scotland’s abortion buffer zone laws, like ours here in NSW, were introduced and passed based on accusations that women seeking abortions would frequently need to run the gauntlet of screaming protestors in order to reach the clinics where they were performed.
These protestors, it was alleged, would harass, threaten and intimidate these vulnerable women and so needed special protections.
Of course it was a load of crap.
I previously participated in these so-called protests before they were outlawed. We would stand across the street from the abortion clinic, in a circle facing each other, with heads bowed in prayer.
We would neither look at nor address the women going in, but just simply pray quietly for an end to abortion.
We were no threat, nor was Rose Docherty and her sign telling women that she was there to speak with them if they wanted to approach.
The truth is that despite the justification given for them in parliament, these laws were not about preventing women from harassment. They were the first step in removing any discussion of abortion as a moral question at all.
Prohibiting any opposition to abortion, even in the form of prayer or an offer of help, within 150 metres of an abortion clinic, was the beginning of a campaign to make having an abortion as unexceptional and undisputed as getting a filling in your tooth.
The next step in this campaign was the full decriminalisation of abortion to birth, which occurred here in NSW back in 2019.
But this hasn’t been enough for abortion activists, who are now seeking to take the next few steps in one (very foul) swoop.
As reported previously in the Catholic Weekly, the bill tabled Greens MLC Amanda Cohn aims to do four things: allow the NSW Health Minister to force public health organisations, including faith-based hospitals, to provide abortions; require conscientiously objecting doctors to refer for abortion, despite their objections; remove the obligation for doctors to provide the Health Secretary information about abortions performed; and allow nurses and endorsed midwives to perform abortions.
Despite being marketed in the language of “availability,” it is clear each of these changes is aimed at removing the moral question of abortion from the public square.
The reason behind stripping conscience protections from Catholic institutions and individual doctors is not about availability: it is about creating an environment where abortion is not a matter of conscience at all.
Don’t take my word for it. Cohn’s upper house colleague, Abigail Boyd, said as much in her second reading speech on the bill. “As a Greens member, I find the idea of conscience votes quite interesting. The Greens are pro-choice. I do not really understand other parties… To us it is obvious. Every Greens MP in every State and Territory and in Canberra will vote for reproductive health rights for women every time.”
It’s not a matter of conscience, she says. It is just a policy.
The push to remove the obligation to notify the Health Secretary of abortions performed and provide information the Secretary requests has a similar motive: abortion isn’t special or different or grave, so it should not have its own reporting requirements. And given it is so routine, there is no reason why nurses and midwives cannot be abortionists as well.
This is not about availability. It is about trying to create a society where abortion is unquestioned and such a society begins with laws that silence any objection to abortion, or any treatment of it as different to routine health care.
That is why it is so important we continue to object publicly to abortion. Your public witness, and mine, is the only thing standing in the way of a culture that knows abortion is the taking of an innocent human life, and one that considers it as unremarkable as root canal.
We need to protest every time. We need to write, ring and rally. The Greens and others like them are counting on us giving up, either because we are too exhausted, or too complacent, or believe that our efforts are futile.
We might have to wait 50 years for these horrible laws to change. We might not see victory in our lifetime. But the laws matter less than the culture they form, and our voices—on behalf of the unborn—can and will shape this culture.
I will be joining the indefatigable Dr Joanna Howe for the next public rally against the Greens abortion bill on Wednesday, 7 May at 5.30pm outside NSW Parliament House. Please join us there, not only to protest against this bill but, more importantly, fight back against attempts to remove the moral question of abortion from the public square altogether.
More information at drjoannahowe.com/rally.