To think men have no right to stand outside abortion clinics and do this.

[QuestioningStuff]

Posted before about my pregnancy. I am having a termination today. This is not a decision I've made lightly.

I've arrived at the clinic and there is a middle aged man and his young teen son standing outside with camp chairs and flasks. Putting up awful pictures and signs. Trying to hand out leaflets.

I think women who do this are also scum but how on earth could a man think he has any right to do this? Turn up at a place where women are at their most scared and vulnerable and try to bully them?

It's really really upset me. I hate them so much right now.

I want to go and tell them exactly what I think of them but don't think that would be helpful at this time.

Mummy - yes, yes I did feel guilty. Mine was a forced termination. But even if it wasn't, I can't afford a child. So someone stops me terminating... Will they be there to pay for the child? No. So it's not that they actually care about the child's life

I agree Hygge, for some protestors this is their sport.

So, Mummy, because I'd like to get this straight - you believe that a woman who, for example, has found out her fetus has a condition that's incompatible with life, or whose partner is violent, or who simply cannot afford (financially or emotionally) to bear a child, has to feel guilty, otherwise she'd be perfectly comfortable walking past these twats? Have you actually thought this through?

Hygge - you have to wonder if they have ever changed anyone's mind.

They may have changed someone's mind. but they sure as hell didn't change anyone's circumstances.

A baby born to people who couldn't afford to feed them or had no where to house them or simply didn't want them, is hardly an achievement.

It's bullying plain and simple.

Protestors are routinely moved away from (for example) corporate headquarters, but women are fair game.

Corporate HQs are often set within grounds that are private property. So you will be moved out to the main entrance on a public road. If an HQ is just a normal building in a street, of course you can protest outside, so long as you don't cause an obstruction in the pavement / road. Same as protests outside a clinic. If it's peaceful and not causing an obstruction, it's ok. In law, handing out leaflets and posters of what goes on inside is fine. People who protest against animal experimentation often have posters of distressing images. Nothing illegal about that. Anyone suggesting that you shouldn't hold up posters of tortured animals outside a vivisection lab in case it upset the people working there or their customers would be quite rightly flamed.

I don't like these anti abortion twats either, but to suggest that they get an easier ride than corporate protesters because they are targeting women is disingenuous / untrue.

Exactly the same regulations apply to all protests and are applied equally in most cases.

Unfortunately, living in a free society means people are free to hold idiotic views and stage stupid protests.

LikePirate Why do I have to wonder that?

I doubt they've changed anybody's mind, but I would believe they've managed to frighten some desperate women away.

Possibly forcing them to reschedule for a termination at a later point in the pregnancy.

While they carry on enjoying their little pavement party and upsetting every women who crosses their path just for daring to walk down the street that has a clinic on it.

Fuckers.

timely article in The Guardian from the point of view of an abortion doctor

"the living woman has more rights than the foetus?"

Yes, mummyusername, in the UK at the moment, this is exactly the legal difference between a living human being and a foetus.

A foetus doesn't have legal rights. A living woman does, including the rights not be be harassed and the right to access health care.

If you don't agree with this situation, then lobby for the law to be changed.

I just mean I'd feel compelled to speculate.

@TTWK - I don't think it's unfortunate! Todays undesirable ideas can be, or give rise to, tomorrow's great ones.

That's what I said christina. People should admit this fact rather than try to make out it is only one body (the woman's body) involved.

Even my 70-something, mass attending mother is turned off by the antics of the loony protestors. On paper she should belong to the demographic that is supportive of them.

She isn't.

Regarding prohibiting protests - there are actually very large areas around Parliament where this is precisely the case. You don't have the right to protest where you like in this country.

These protestors are lazy, superior twats in my opinion (whatever sex). They routinely use graphic imagery of 24 week terminations, shouting at women having 9 week terminations that they are showing them what they are doing.

If they want to make termination illegal then they are entitled to their opinion (but must recognise that a percentage of those will turn into illegal abortions and deaths), but the way to achieve that is to lobby Parliament and their MP.

If they want to make women choose differently, how about pouring their energies into supporting vulnerable women? The ones who might want to continue pregnancy but not feel that they can. Every day they sit on their arses with their flask is a day they didn't do that.

Picketing a clinic has that attractive combination of moral superiority without any actual effort. Harassing women ain't big, and it ain't clever.

Of course I don't know what everyone who has an abortion thinks Gideon but I do think that most women having an abortion do feel some guilt at some level about it even though they might feel it's their only option.

Hygge-While they carry on enjoying their little pavement party and upsetting every women who crosses their path just for daring to walk down the street that has a clinic on it.

Well that's not true, is it? Many women are anti abortion so they won't be upset just walking down the street and seeing the protest. And many women who a ok with abortion or on their way down the street to have an abortion are mentally strong and won't be in the least upset by these morons. They will just stroll past them and not give the protest a second thought. (which is probably the reaction that annoys the protesters the most!)

So to say they upset every woman who dares to walk down the street is nonsense.

Just wondering if there is a clue in mumyusername's name? If so abandon the thread now!

It's such a fallacy that most women feel guilt at having an abortion.

Regarding prohibiting protests - there are actually very large areas around Parliament where this is precisely the case. You don't have the right to protest where you like in this country.

That's a pretty recent thing and is sensible in light of the terrorist threat at the moment. If the terrorist threat subsides it could well be reversed.

During the war there were various restrictions in place on all kinds of things that curtailed our freedom, that lapsed when war was over.

There is no ongoing terrorist threat to abortion clinics in the UK (although there has been in the US).

Eh, mummynamechange, what fact should people admit?

Legally speaking, there is only one person/body involved in abortion in the UK at this current time.

The woman who is pregnant has a number of legal rights. The embryo/foetus she is carrying doesn't.

As me and others have said, if you aren't happy with this situation, use the democratic means available to you to lobby for change, rather than harass people and institutions who have no power to change the law ie the people accessing healthcare and the healthcare providers.

What on earth do you think people should 'admit' to?

yanbu

they are not protesting they are trying to bully women who may be feeling very vulnerable. they know this if they really wanted to protest they can do so outside parliament but the aim is to make the woman who has had a termination feel guilty

I personally think men should stfu with it comes discussions about abortion unless of course they support women having full autonomy over their own body

Well, roughly 10 years the exclusion zone so, you know, not that recent.

The terrorism argument is pretty much bullshit and everyone knows it. There is a fuck off great road and roundabout outside Parliament. Anyone with the skills to blow up the building could do so pretty easily from a car or the pavement. They don't need to be able to assemble in groups to protest to do that.

But that is really a distraction from the central point, which is that we don't have an unfettered right to protest in this country. We decide that some things are more important than that right. And I'd put harassing vulnerable women accessing a lawful service in that category. They are scum. Lazy scum.

And 'the protesters aren't around to mind the baby later' is not a valid pro-abortion argument as the logical extension is that one can't protest about anyone being killed unless they're willing to mind them. The only logically valid pro-abortion is "it is a foetus, not a living person".

TTWK - the exclusion zone around parliament has nothing to do with terrorism.

OP - I'm so sorry you had to go through this. It's outrageous intimidation and harassment. And I'm even sorrier that some women think that it's acceptable.

Nobody is "pro-abortion". The term is pro-choice.

Compelled to speculate on what though?

I don't know what bit of my description of their behaviour made you think they might be changing people's minds for any other reason than that they managed to frighten and intimidate some woman away from the clinic.

Which is not really changing someone's mind, it's bullying them to go through with a pregnancy they do not really want to continue. Or delaying a termination for a week or two more.

I've seen them in action and never once thought they were doing anything that could reasonably change a woman's mind. They are doing things to frighten women, and upset women, and to make women feel guilty, and to distress women, and to intimidate women. But nothing to help women.

And as Giles said, even if they did manage to make someone change their mind, they still haven't changed their circumstances. What they are doing doesn't suddenly mean that a woman is emotionally or physically more able to continue a pregnancy, or make her relationship a safe one, or her finances more stable, or her baby more likely to survive if she's terminating for medical reasons, or change any of the thousands of other reasons which led to the woman making her own decision to terminate in the first place.

Also they are sending a message out to women who are not even using the clinic and it's services. Telling them that this is what they will face if they ever are in need of the clinic. Intimidating them in advance.

That's not changing people's minds, it's controlling them through fear.

They know nothing at all about the women using the clinic, or the women just walking down the road, yet they feel they can block their path and sing their songs and force their pictures at women and shout their slogans and demands at them.

And then they walk away with no real idea or no real care of what they've done to people that day, what pain and upset they might have caused, but they still come back again a week later to do it all again.

So no, what they are doing, what I've seen them doing, what they've done to me, it's never made me speculate on anything regarding them changing women's minds, but it has made me very certain that they are harming women and frightening women at a time when they need support, not guilt trips and harassment.