A bill to establish exclusion zones around abortion clinics in New South Wales has passed the state’s upper house.
The bill, which establishes 150m protest exclusion zones around abortion clinics in the state, passed through the legislative council without a division after several hours of debate.
It will now go to the state’s lower house where the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has indicated that she is likely to support it.
The Guardian reported on Wednesday that the legislation appeared certain to pass after the governing Liberal-National party coalition gave its MPs a conscience vote on the bill.
The bill was co-sponsored by Labor’s Penny Sharpe and Trevor Khan from the Nationals, and it was a group of Nationals MPs who assured its passage through the council.
Sarah Mitchell, a Nationals MP and the minister for early childhood education, gave an emotional speech in which she told the House that she had two miscarriages between giving birth to her two daughters.
“I was in shock,” she said. “It was a day that started with us hoping to see our baby’s heartbeat for the first time to emergency ultrasounds, to a surgical procedure that afternoon to remove the baby as that was the best clinical option for me.
“On that day it was a traumatic enough experience [and] I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be entering a place for treatment after losing my baby and to be harassed, called names, shown pictures or filmed or even handed pamphlets or prayed for by people who may have genuinely been doing it because they were well meaning.
“It would have pushed me over the edge at my most fragile.”
She said the reality it is “not and will never be immediately evident to anyone standing outside as to why someone [is] walking through the front door” of a health clinic.
Another Nationals MP, Bronnie Taylor, a former nurse, spoke with her 22-year-old daughter in the gallery. She said that former patients of hers had been harassed outside of medical clinics.
“I want to make sure today that my daughters, my friends, whoever I know and care about, will never ever be harassed and will be free to make their choice,” she said.
“And they can remember today that we stood here and stood up for them to protect them, to honour them, and to give them the dignity they so deserve.”
Catherine Cusack, a moderate Liberal party MP, opposed the bill because, she said, it would impinge on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, which she called “cornerstones of all of our freedoms”.
“The reason we can call it a freedom is because those rights are accessible to all irrespective or their political or religious creed,” she said.
She said that there were situations where speech was “repugnant to our personal values” but that “that in itself is not enough to make a law”.
During the debate the ultra-conservative MP Fred Nile from the Christian Democrats party claimed that sewage pipes at an abortion clinic had become blocked by “baby body parts”.
“Little arms, little legs,” he said.
In her address in reply, Sharpe rebuked the claim and said it was “completely false”. She read a statement from the clinic stating that the blockage had been caused by a broken pipe elsewhere in the building.
Sharpe called the bill a “small but important change for women in NSW”.
“What is happening outside clinics is not protest, it is harassment, even if it is well-intentioned,” she said. “Women should be able to go to the doctors and not have to explain themselves on the street.”
