Abortion clinic buffer zones are not an attack on free speech, they protect people from harassment – Laura Waddell

My argument for buffer zones is this. It’s 2022, and what a woman does with her body is her own damn business.

Buffer zones would see anti-abortion protests moved further away from health clinics and hospitals (Picture: John Devlin)

And for that matter, what anyone does with their body is their own business, despite conservative culture warriors, queer bashers and misogynist podcast hosts doing their best to convince followers our bodies are fair game for public debate.This is where the caveats usually come in – the apologetic addendum along the lines of “as long as they’re hurting neither themselves nor others”.

But, frankly, that’s the baseline standard of living among other people, something we should expect all of humanity to aspire to, an unconventional given that scarcely needs stated. But these are the days of moral panic and populists in an endless, cruel propaganda push to smear anyone living contrary to their ideal traditional family unit.

Social conservatives are adept at creating bogeymen. Discrediting a political opponent is a strategy as crude as it is old, but witnessing it in the era of right-wing forces adept at manipulating social media misinformation is especially grim.

It can be seen in how the Trumpist conspiracy movement QAnon managed to convince thousands of obsessive online followers to believe, literally, that the left sacrifices babies.

It’s what homophobes did loudly in the days of Section 28 when they called gays, lesbians and bisexuals child predators and it’s what transphobes echo today, appallingly often from the opinion pages of mainstream British newspapers, when they claim a minority’s very existence is merely a harmful ideology that must be stamped out.

It’s what violent men in the public eye have their defence attorneys and publicity spinners do to victims who stand up against them and seek justice, in every hysterical claim that #MeToo was the real threat to society or the workplace or Hollywood. And, inevitably, it’s a tactic anti-abortionists use in an attempt to control and frighten women out of a choice that belongs to us.

I’m not of the belief those who stand outside hospitals with placards bearing graphic images and antagonising words about evil and murder are motivated by a desire to ‘help’.

Frankly, I don’t care whether they claim they come in love or in hatred, because either way, it's intimidating. There’s a disturbing arrogance in the placard-holders’ belief that they have the right to target those accessing a medical service.

When they’re not calling what they do a ‘vigil’ they call it a protest; reaching for the argument of free speech, claiming victimisation. But buffer zones will not stop freedom of expression in public spaces. Buffer zones prevent, quite specifically, the ability to target and harass individuals accessing medical services.

Anti-abortionists targeting women who may be in an acutely vulnerable position is especially galling. Some, however, may simply be going about their routine business – nobody’s business but theirs and their doctor.

Those lurking outside health centres aren’t content to go off and live to their own ideals, but actively campaign to limit the bodily autonomy of women.

In these aims they are supported by cash-splashing US lobbyists and far-right demagogues, who wish to roll back equalities legislation and limit education and medical care. But our bodies aren’t anybody’s business but our own.