Any given Saturday

Every Saturday like clockwork, anti-abortionists and pro-choice activists stand outside East Melbourne’s Fertility Control Clinic.

It’s the clinic which last week announced it was taking legal action against the City of Melbourne for failing to deal with anti-abortionists harassing patients who are trying to get inside.

Lord Mayor Rbert Doyle believes Victoria’s controversial new ‘move on’ laws will deal with the issue, but pro-choice groups here feel this is a dangerous trade-off.

I’m here on a Saturday in late summer, waiting for the “rosary parade”, a small group who carry a statue of Mary from a nearby church to pray outside the clinic.

As it is, all the anti-abortionists are holding are placards. There’s the occasional beep at the ‘Honk If UR Pro-Choice Sign’. One driver yells, “Get a fucking job.” It’s unclear to whom. A female cyclist slow down and calls the anti-abortionists “disgusting”.

Another sign reads ‘Babies are murdered here’. “There’s only been one murder here,” says one ‘defender’ of the clinic, a reference to Peter Knight, the anti-abortionist who shot dead a security guard here in 2001.

The clinic is “defended” by people like Martin Leahy*, a ‘friend of the Fertility Clinic’, and Radical Women, a socialist feminist group led by Debbie Brennan.

 

The clinic opens at 7:30am with most patients for the day inside shortly after. 9am is too late to see why the defenders are here.

Jeanette Meren, pro-choice, has brought her baby today. She had an abortion earlier in her life. “I believe if people want to have children they can have them at a time that suits them,” she says.

“[The anti-abortionists] have got no idea what people are coming here for,” says Martin.

One woman coming to use the shops confronts the anti-abortionists but quickly leaves. They don’t try shoving pamphlets in her face (or mine until after I start talking to them).

Both pro-choice and anti-abortionists feel the media isn’t entirely on their side. Trudy** of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants tells me “the media always distorts the truth” and doubts a 2006 poll where 65% of Australians said they supported abortion***.

Two other anti-abortionists are Georgia Florence and Jonathon Vasila, here with his parents (who didn’t push him into this, they say). Jonathon shoots his own YouTube films of anti-abortion rallies.

“If young people during the holocaust could get thrown into prison and killed for standing against the slaughter of Jews, I’m willing to do anything to stand against the slaughter of babies,” says Georgia.

The rosary parade never shows, it’s “a victory” for Radical Women and they pack up to go but the anti-abortionists move to take their spots directly outside the gate to the clinic.

* Martin Leahy is a member of the Australian Sex Party but is here today unofficially.

** Trudy did not want to disclose her last name.

*** In the recording a “2008 Nielsen Poll” was quoted, it was actually a 2006 Morgan poll.