Family Planning Clinics: Public Order Legislation

Stephanie Peacock Excerpts

Tuesday 7th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Abortion was made legal in this country 50 years ago, public opinion supports its current legal status and there is no majority in this House for doing away with a woman’s right to choose. We have had debates about time limits and so forth, but I think that every Member knows that if this issue were debated again on the Floor of the House, we as a Parliament would still want to ensure a woman’s right to choose. So what are these demonstrators doing? They are actually setting themselves up against the settled view of the House of Commons and, more importantly, of the public. Theirs is a sort of guerrilla attack on a woman’s right to choose. That is what is so problematic about it.

I first raised this issue some years ago. In 2015, I tabled an early-day motion about it and I went to visit clinics, including the BPAS clinic in Blackfriars, where, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) described, activists carrying enormous, disturbing and graphic posters were menacing staff and patients. People talk about patients being menaced, but I spoke to staff at that clinic and the demonstrations are very upsetting for them, too. Activists hand expectant mothers horrifying leaflets and film conversations with members of the public without asking for consent. At urban advice clinics, that is particularly troubling for women from minority communities, who will feel particularly ashamed and conflicted about what they are doing. Someone who tries to walk peacefully into a clinic to get advice has to face those threatening demonstrations. Activists try to disguise their activism as prayer vigils or peaceful protests, but in reality they take advantage of the protections afforded to those activities.

These demonstrations are problematic partly because, as I have said, it is as if activists, through guerrilla actions and threatening activity, are trying to roll back 50 years, but they are also problematic because they are modelled on American tactics. A growing number of family planning clinics in America have been closed following demonstrations, attacks and even bombings. I am not saying that demonstrations here go that far, but let us remember that there have been bombings in America and that medical staff, including doctors, who offer women this sort of support have found themselves threatened and attacked.

[Stephanie Peacock (Barnsley East) (Lab)]

On family planning, we have seen cuts to the NHS and the closure of family planning centres across the country. We need to look at education—not just family planning support but education in schools, too. This debate is about protecting women who have made the most difficult decision of their lives. They will seek support in advance rather than doing so as they go into the clinic.

[Ms Abbott]

Yes, and the idea that people can be offered practical help from behind a horrible poster of a dismembered foetus as they go into a clinic is clearly false and disingenuous.

Of course people should have a choice. My generation of feminist activists did not march about this issue to impose a particular set of decisions on women; all we said was that women should have a choice. They are better offered that choice with proper family planning advice and with sex and relationships advice in schools. That is where people should be shown their options and shown how they can genuinely have a choice—not outside clinics by people holding banners and shouting at them.

We heard a story about a lady who says that demonstrators saved her baby’s life. I wonder. I do not say anything about the speech by the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I do wonder. What I have seen—I went to see it for myself—and heard about these demonstrations tells me that they are not a way to offer people practical advice.

Many of the groups involved also oppose contraception, sex education and even IVF treatment. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children is running a homophobic campaign against kids being taught about sexual orientation. Other groups have links to the far right. So-called pro-life people had a “march for life” this year in Birmingham. They flew in speakers from the US. They brought in Jim Dowson of Youth Defence, who is linked with the British National party; he was a partner of the march for life. Sadly, although there are genuinely devout people in groups such as SPUC and 40 Days for Life, they have a history of using harassment and intimidation, because they have failed politically to win round public opinion. One leader of an anti-choice group calling itself Precious Life was convicted of harassing the director of a Marie Stopes clinic in Northern Ireland.

This is not about people expressing an opinion. I am a Member of Parliament; I believe in healthy and vigorous debate. This is about people trying to threaten, intimidate and harass staff members and women—members of the public—who seek desperately needed advice, and perhaps making those women too frightened to step over the threshold of a clinic to get the advice they need. It would be entirely wrong if, 50 years after it agreed that women should have a right to choose, this House failed to say now that that right to choose should be meaningful and should not be disrupted or opposed by these demonstrations. We have to look at ways of making women seeking advice and staff members in clinics safe, and there is no doubt that we have to look at the question of zones.