"An Insulting and Useless Gesture"

Go right now and read this great piece on clinic protesters in Canada. It sums up the situation in Fredericton to a T (although it is based on a different clinic).

The clinic I work in now has an injunction, so we don't get protesters, but I think the author is right to suggest that municipal legislation (like they have in BC) would better serve the clinic staff and patients. People who work in abortion care exist in a small bubble - we know each other and fear for each other, and knowing that people at other clinics in the city and across the country are safe from anti-choice violence would make me feel a lot more at ease. We need to work as a team to provide safe and accessible abortion services to women in this country, and universal protection is necessary.

Honestly at this point I can't figure out why people still do sidewalk counselling; I have never ever seen it work, not even once in the three years I worked at the Fredericton clinic. People coming in have either already made up their minds to have the abortion, or they stop and talk to the protesters because they've made up their mind not to have it and they're looking for a way out. The ones that decide not to have an abortion - either while they're in the clinic or out on the sidewalk - were never going to have one anyway, whether the protesters were there or not. You start to get a feeling for who is going to go through with it; I can usually tell now just talking to them on the phone. I wish they would stay for long enough to talk to the clinic's counsellor, just to work through whatever issues they might be dealing with, or to get set up with some information and resources on adoption and/or parenting, but it's ok: you can't make people's choices for them. That's part of the whole "trust women" thing that the pro-life movement just does not seem to be able to grasp.