Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical
Torrey Orton
Jan. 9, 2012

I look forward to the views of St James Ethics Centre on the ethics of our proposed action described below. At least, some generic guidelines for our thinking so far would be useful. I will be approaching Ethi-Call, the Centre's telephone ethics consulting service for an opinion of the following strategy when they re-open in a week. This article is still in draft at this posting.

I write on behalf of a loose assemblage called Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic (FCC), numbering around 6-8 volunteers who appear solo or in pairs at least 4 of the 6 mornings a week the clinic is open. We support patients arriving between 7:30 and 9AM who are being challenged by Helpers of God's Precious Infants (HoGPIs). The HoGPIs' view is that they are offering help to pregnant women who are, in their own views, being harassed by the HoGPIs.


Proof of the patient perception lies in two facts: almost no patients ever take up the help offer (as reported by the HoGPIs themselves) and, two, once the patients pass by the first offer they are subjected to various degrees of continuing verbal harassment (as defined technically by the Melbourne City Council by-laws, which is also harassment by our standards and, we believe, the standards of most of society). The HoGPIs have on passive display materials which can only be called provocative for patients and partners. Their view is that they make no contribution to patient distress because patients are already distressed – a simple, but self-serving ignorance of the psychology of stress (it is cumulative!).


We have been supporting patients for 18 months now. The HoGPIs in some cases have been protesting for 20 years at this site, or another. We are on a first name basis with the principal actors of the HoGPIs, though none will take responsibility for leadership on the site. The regular HoGPI participants number about 10, with daily numbers varying from 4 to12. The most persistently aggressive of their number are women. Patients do not know they are usually being covertly filmed by one HoGPI and their daily numbers recorded manually, all assumed to be seeking abortions. The HoGPIs do not know which patients are coming for abortions and which for other fertility control help.


Apart from our presence, which patients spontaneously thank us for, we support by actively pointing out when HoGPIs have stepped over the technical harassment line, usually saying to the offending HoGPI, "they said 'no'". Sometimes some of us step between patients and protestors after that line has been crossed and accompany them to the clinic entrance. The pattern of events under discussion occur on a public footpath bounded on one side by the property line of the clinic and overseen by a security guard each day (one of whom was shot to death 10 years ago by a protest-associated gunman; no one in the clinic has forgotten that this is a possible end game of their professional commitment).


Our commitment to patient support is based mainly on the need to reduce patient stress. I am professionally committed to this as a psychologist and psychotherapist. Others of the Friends have their own reasons, but reducing patient stress is always the starting place for our actions. Therefore, any actions we undertake to inhibit, moderate, or deflect HoGPI impacts are judged from a patient stress reduction perspective.


Our actions are largely seen by HoGPIs to be an inhibition of their freedom of expression. They seek legal redress for our perceived indiscretions, e.g. being supposedly "provocative" by pointing out the connection between their anti-abortion line and the Church's clear anti-contraception and anti-gay positions, plus its present difficulties with systemic paedophilia. We are prompted to remind them about the latter difficulty when a regularly appearing priest adds his contribution to the patient experience as he surveys the clinic entrance from 6 feet away: "protect your child." They call the police when offended. This results in no reportable offenses being found.


We have made efforts to assist the HoGPIs to increase the effectiveness of their first offer to patients so that there would be greater uptake potential and less added stress for patients. These efforts have been documented, discussed and refused consistently. Two of their number attempt to discourage the more flagrant misbehaviours of their colleagues.


The HoGPIs are absolutely certain about when life starts and finishes. From that position they judge others' positions as right or wrong. The source, and authority, of their position is the Catholic Church's published positions on said issues, available for all to see on their website. From their point of view, no one has the right to any other position. Hence they label as "murderers", including by implication patients, those differing with them at the FCC. They do not extend to non-believers the democratic consideration we extend to them as our starting point in opposing them – that they have a right to say what they want. We do not oppose their offering help, but we are "going to hell" for opposing their excesses.


Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.



We know that the HoGPIs will vigorously defend their perception that they are not harassing the patients, just trying to help them…to the point of claiming, as one did recently when she was haranguing a couple who had turned away from the offer of help, that she was just "speaking to herself" in mouthing the standard accusative mantras at users of the clinic's services.


Now it's time for a new step. Remember the context, in brief, is this: 6 days a week the already emotionally charged patients of the fertility control clinic are confronted by anti-abortion protestors whose behaviour clearly offends them to the point of tears in many cases and outbursts of rage in a few. These patients are entirely within their legal and moral rights to use the services of the clinic.


This will be a more confronting step, at least from our viewpoint. Confronting for us is the fact that we have to become much more systematically attentive to HoGPI misbehaviour in order to push the Melbourne City Council / police authorities to enforce their own rules of public behaviour – notably the rules against public harassment.


So we are committing to a persistent data gathering campaign by live video to clearly document HoGPI transgressions against the law of harassment, and three other recurrent invasions of patient privacy. These three are:

(1) 'gang tackling' approaching patients in pairs or trios with the effect of partially blocking their normal progress along the footpath;

(2) chasing patients from many meters down the footpath, sometimes as far as 100 meters from the clinic so that their approach to the clinic is punctuated by the continuing presence of protestor(s); and,

(3) corralling patients in their cars on arrival so they cannot easily get out.

Harassment data is the most difficult to collect because it requires close video with audio which is highly likely to be more confronting for patients than HoGPIs.


This project, once agreed by all stakeholders on the FCC side, will be clearly advertised to the HoGPIs, as have been all our other initiatives. That is, we are trying to work with democratic values of openness and transparency in a context where they are not shared by the 'opposition' in the name of their right to free expression.


Torrey Orton
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