Canada: Anti-abortion protester loses appeal at Supreme Court

[Lucy Goosey]

This is good news, I think. I hope it won't have bad implications for restricting/limiting other types of protests, though. Of course the right to protest abortion clinics still exists, but the defendant here regularly gets too close to clinics and attempts to "counsel" women who are entering.

A dogged anti-abortion protester has lost a big step in her legal battle to defy an 18-year-old injunction against picketing Toronto abortion clinics.

In an 8-1 decision The Supreme Court of Canada upheld Friday two lower appeal rulings that underlined criminal powers to enforce injunctions in the absence of any other law on the books.

It means if the Crown decides to proceed yet again, Linda Gibbons, 63, will face a new criminal trial for breaching an injunction issued on Aug. 30, 1994.

That order was meant to keep protesters at least 18 metres away from clinics, in the wake of a wave of tension-filled protests, and the firebombing of Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s Toronto clinic in the years after the country’s top court struck out Canada’s abortion law.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1208134--anti-abortion-protester-loses-bid-to-defy-1994-injunction-supreme-court-rules

Gibbons has spent about 10 of the last 20 years in jail for repeatedly and knowingly breaking the injunction against protesting within 18 metres of a clinic. She even refused to post $500 bail, because staying away from clinics was a condition of the bail. She has no one to blame but herself for facing criminal charges yet again. But with this happening in the wake of Quebec trying to shut down student protests, it has me a bit concerned that this good Supreme Court ruling could now be used for nefarious purposes.

To me, the difference between big protests against governments and Gibbons's protests against abortion clinics is that she (and others like her) targets individual women for unsolicited "counselling" - I think this targeting of individuals, as opposed to legislative bodies, is what makes the safe zone injunctions appropriate for abortion clinics. I've never received unsolicited counselling from a stranger while heading in to a doctor's office, but I don't think one has to experience it personally to know that it would feel like straight-up harassment, even if the perpetrator wasn't doing anything physically violent or aggressive.

I'm rambling a bit here - this is just the first time I've thought of clinic safe-zones as potentially being used as precedent for limiting other types of protest.