Abortion Clinics (Access) (Hansard, 19 May 1993)

§ Mr. Harry Cohen (Leyton)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to prohibit interference with, and intimidation or harassment of, any person using an abortion clinic or any person employed therein, and the obstruction of access to such premises; to provide remedies for persons affected by such acts; to require information on counselling services to be given to persons seeking an abortion; and for connected purposes. The activities referred to in the Bill should be written into our law as a clear criminal offence. When it boils down to it, such activity is another form of violence towards women, in this case women who are already in an anxious state.

Abortion is legal. It is outrageous that, after making a painful and difficult decision, perhaps after careful counselling and discussion with their partner, women attending clinics for treatment should be the subject of abuse and harassment and placed in fear of violence. The same goes for clinical workers.

Seven weeks ago, Rescue America despicably forced several women to run the gauntlet of its abuse and intimidation. A report of that appeared in The Guardianon 2 April. One woman said: I couldn't believe the way they just descended on me. They swarmed around me and I was very frightened. When she arrived at the clinic, she burst into tears. She said: Having an abortion is not an easy decision and I was already feeling emotionally unstable. These people just took advantage of that. I was shaking and crying and had to go and sit in a room to calm myself down …They are not going to achieve anything like this. Women think very carefully about having abortions and these people are not going to change anybody's mind. I think they are all sick and very intimidating. I believe that everyone has the right to hold an opinion but these people hounded me. I felt like a criminal and am still very disturbed by what happened … It was very distressing and occurred at a time when I have enough to worry about already. Those were the words of a woman who was harassed by Rescue America.

The activities of Rescue America and Rescue Outreach are becoming increasingly violent in the United States. The groups do not merely block access. They have undertaken fire bombings, arson attacks and acid attacks on clinics. They have stormed hospital theatres. There have been shootings. A Florida doctor was shot dead outside his clinic earlier this year. The director of Rescue America, Don Treshman, called it "unfortunate" and added chillingly: had he not been killed, many more babies would have died at his hands. Last year marked a record for violence against clinics in the United States. There were 1,107 acts of serious violence such as bombing, arson, chemical contamination, invasion and vandalism. It cost almost $50 million. Special camps were set up to train members to read licence plates, follow people and harass them at home, and illegally enter schools to leaflet children with pictures of foetuses.

With such fanaticism, there must be a real danger of harm to women arriving at abortion clinics and to the workers there. The people involved are trying to export this intimidation and violence to the United Kingdom. They have set up Rescue UK, and training courses have been organised by their American counterparts. These include instruction on how to intervene physically, with 242 violence. James Morrow, the founder of Rescue UK, has been arrested more than a dozen times, and in 1989 he was convicted of assault on a pregnant clinic manager.

I believe that, for infamy and ignominy, the demonstrations that took place outside abortion clinics seven weeks ago were on a par with those of the racist dockers in the 1960s. The rights of women should be protected by law, yet the role of the police was far from satisfactory. They did not ensure complete freedom of access or freedom from intimidation. They put the demonstrators first and the women second. At some demonstrations, they refused to allow women to go through on their own, despite the fact that these women were engaging in lawful personal business, and, on grounds of public order, they also refused to allow escorts, such as those from the National Abortion Campaign, to accompany the women.

With such tactics, the police were, in effect, doing Operation Rescue's job for it. It is also known that some of the police officers involved expressed their support for Operation Rescue. Policing tactics were inconsistent, being down to individual police officers. That is most unsatisfactory. The Home Office should produce some consistent guidelines and ensure that women's rights are paramount.

In our democracy, anti-abortion groups have the right to demonstrate. They can lobby Parliament and march through London or any other town. However, they should not be allowed to abuse individual women who, having made an often painful and difficult decision, are attending clinics for treatment that they are, by law, allowed to have. Threatening individual women who are seeking treatment is cowardly. My Bill puts the women's rights and their safety first. It creates a clear criminal offence where there is intimidation or where people's access is blocked.

It is necessary to give women a choice at an earlier stage, when they are considering what to do. That is why my Bill puts on general practitioners an onus to inform women what sort of counselling is available and might be helpful to them. Violent demonstration and intimidation should be no part of the process. The Home Secretary was right to have Don Treshman of Rescue America arrested and deported on the grounds that his activities were not conducive to the public good. However, that was not a satisfactory mechanism. In any case, we have our own home-grown intimidation and women bashers. Nor are obstruction laws the right ones to use in these circumstances. We saw how the police implemented those laws: they prevented women from securing their legal rights. We need a clear-cut law making it illegal to block access to abortion clinics.

It is ironic that one outcome of these incidents is that demonstrations in the royal parks are not acceptable. In the interests of the women and clinic workers, demonstrations outside abortion clinics should not be acceptable. We should have this law in place before these dangerous fanatics return in September, as they have vowed to do.

The Bill is supported by the National Abortion Campaign and the Abortion Law Reform Group. Last week, one anti-abortion hon. Member tabled a motion on obscenity. It urges the Government to balance freedom of speech with their responsibility to protect children, women and men from degradation and violence. I similarly seek to protect women who are lawfully using abortion clinics 243 from this latest form of violence by anti-abortion extremists. An editorial on this issue in The Independent concluded with these words: Women should know that they can have abortions within the law without fear of intimidation or more distress than they will in any case experience. My Bill enshrines that.

§ Mrs. Ann Winterton (Congleton)

I wish to oppose the motion. The hon. Member for Leyton (Mr. Cohen) raised a number of important issues on which opinions in the House and outside are deeply held and strongly felt.

I share the hon. Gentleman's concern about the recent scenes that we have witnessed outside both abortion clinics and the administrative headquarters of those who advocate abortion. Those of us who are members of the all-party parliamentary pro-life group have no truck whatever with those individuals or organisations, whatever their views or philosophy, who advocate violence, intimidation or the flouting of the law as a means of furthering their ends.

That rejection of violence and intimidation applies to those from the Socialist Workers party and the National Abortion Campaign who have turned up with the deliberate intention of disrupting peaceful demonstrations, rallies and religious services. It applies equally to those who share our abhorrence of abortion but adopt methods with which we have no sympathy and to which we give no support.

Our opposition to the criminal destruction of property in abortion clinics is as strong as our opposition to the destruction of property that took place during the debate on the Bill introduced some time ago by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Mossley Hill (Mr. Alton), when the headquarters of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children was ransacked by pro-abortion extremists. Our opposition to assaults on any person seeking or advocating an abortion is as strong as our opposition to the sort of cowardly attack which was perpetrated some time ago on the then Father of the House and right hon. Member for Castle Point, Sir Bernard Braine, who was assaulted by a gang of pro-abortion thugs outside a prayer meeting at the Royal Albert hall.

I hope that I have shown that there is some common ground between myself and the hon. Member for Leyton, but despite our common rejection of violence as a means of achieving political change within our parliamentary democracy, I cannot support his appeal. Violence and intimidation are already illegal in this country, as indeed are crimes against property. There already exists a wide range of powers available to the courts to deal with such activities, whether they take place outside abortion clinics or outside factories.

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman would be so keen to ask for tougher action against those on the Timex picket line? The law surely must be applied firmly, but fairly and equally, to protect all who seek to exercise their right to demonstrate peacefully, and to prevent violence and intimidation wherever it arises.

The hon. Member for Leyton seeks also to liberalise still further the Abortion Act 1967 by creating a new requirement to provide information and counseling 244 services, which suggests that there is a right under present legislation to have an abortion. That is not the case. The legislation merely provides a defence against prosecution if abortion is performed under one of a given set of circumstances. It does not provide for a right of access to abortion.

That is an important legal point, because it is now common practice to interpret the legislation differently, with many doctors openly operating a policy of abortion on demand. The result is that more than 90 per cent. of abortions are performed for reasons of social convenience. A staggering 3.7 million abortions have now been performed under the terms of the Abortion Act. Of those, only 151—or 0.004 per cent.—were performed in emergency to save the life of the mother.

The right hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Sir D. Steel), when he promoted the legislation 25 years ago, told us that abortion would liberate women and make every child a wanted child. The opposite has been the effect. Abortion has allowed society to sweep under the carpet the very problems for which it was hailed as a panacea.

Abortion has failed abysmally. It allows the continuing exploitation of women and their health and, as the inexorable increase in child abuse has shown, the devaluation of human life before birth has altered society's attitudes to children after birth. The hon. Member for Leyton and those who profess their faith in the nostrum of liberal abortion laws can now look back on 25 years of failure, of the exploitation of women, and of the slaughter of unborn children.

For those reasons, we should not give the hon. Member leave to bring in his Bill. Those listening to what is said today should take note of the fact that a decision not to divide the House should not be taken to mean support for this measure. It is simply a sign that there are many important issues on today's Order Paper—issues on which hon. Members want to make progress without wasting time by dividing the House over an issue which is little more than a stunt to enable those who share the hon. Gentleman's extremist views to curry favour with their supporters in the pro-abortion lobby outside the House.