Victoria is a step closer to enforcing safe access zones around women’s health clinics to stop anti-abortion protesters harassing patients, after legislation passed the lower house on Thursday.
The bill passed 69 to 13 and is expected to be debated in the Legislative Council before the end of the year.
Similar legislation exists in Tasmania, where it is a criminal offence to protest within 150 metres of a clinic carrying out abortions, and in the Australian Capital Territory, where legislation passed last month to create 50-metre exclusion zones.
In June the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne failed in a bid before the supreme court to stop protesters, who it said had harassed staff and patients at the clinic for almost 20 years.
The director of advocacy and research at the Human Rights Law Centre, Emily Howie, said the vote on Thursday revealed an overwhelming level of support among politicians for women to have safe and private access to medical clinics.
“These protests are another form of violence against women and the feeling was that it was time that it stopped,” Howie said. “We were so pleased and so proud of the Victorian MPs yesterday for seeing this activity out the front of the clinic for what it is – as harassment, intimidation and abuse.”
If the safe access zones bill passes the upper house, as the numbers suggest is likely, 150-metre exclusion zones would be created around any Victorian health services that provide abortions, with protesters banned from obstructing access to the clinic or communicating with women about abortion.
The health minister, Jill Hennessy, spoke in support of the legislation. She told ABC radio women had been filmed by the protesters as they attempted to enter the clinic, and had been harassed and intimidated “year after year, day after day”.
“I think this [legislation] is a commonsense approach to saying that if we have a lawful medical service, people should be able to access that service without being intimidated or harassed,” she said. “That hasn’t been the case to date.”
It was a matter of medical privacy and dignity, she said.
The legislation would also apply to GP clinics prescribing the abortion pill, RU 486, Hennessy said.
Jenny Ejlak, from Reproductive Choice Australia, said there was strong community support for the exclusion zones. “I think the emphasis on violence against women at the moment, and the fact that this is an example of aggression towards women that has been tolerated for far too long, led to the strong support from politicians for this legislation,” Ejlak said.
“The legislation doesn’t at all stop people from holding and expressing certain views. But it stops those behaviours from occurring immediately outside health clinics.”
Anna von Marburg, a coordinator for the anti-abortion group Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, said the politicians who had voted in favour of the legislation had got it wrong.
“Harassment and intimidation laws already exist so we don’t need new laws,” she said. “Despite wild claims by abortion advocates, they have never produced any evidence to support their accusations of bad behaviour by the peaceful protesters.”
Asked for her response to Hennessy’s comments that the legislation seemed likely to pass the upper house, von Marburg responded: “Miracles happen every day.”
