Former anti-choice activity Esther Mitchell speaks with ABC radio’s Jon Faine about why she changed her mind on the question of abortion.
You can listen to the interview here.
Former anti-choice activity Esther Mitchell speaks with ABC radio’s Jon Faine about why she changed her mind on the question of abortion.
You can listen to the interview here.
The attached advertisement will appear in newspapers in the Albury-Wodonga area this coming week.
It was paid for and placed by people I know and trust who continue to work on this issue in the Albury area.
HAVE YOU BEEN HARMED
BY THE ANTI-ABORTION
PROTESTERS IN
ENGLEHARDT STREET?If you have been a patient attending the Englehardt Street Fertility Control Clinic in Albury in the last 5 years, and feel you, your partner or support person have been offended, intimidated, harassed or violated by the protesters outside the clinic, we would like to hear from you.
We are a group supporting your right to pregnancy choices and health care, and are committed to improving your safety and privacy when you access legal health services. Comments made to us will be totally confidential and they will be used to highlight the harmful effects of protesters outside medical clinics.
Your input may assist us to stop the protesters and help protect other women from the emotional harm caused by them.
Please contact
alburychoice@gmail.com
By way of a disclaimer, I continue to maintain and update this website as a resource on the issue of access to fertility control in Albury, however I am not presently living in Albury, and I am certainly not qualified to provide legal, emotional or medical support.
For support in Albury, please contact the Fertility Control Centre directly. If you would like to get in touch with people working on this issue in Albury, you can contact the email address above, or contact me through this site and I will put you in touch.
Kieran.
by Dr Pieter Mourick AM
The continued protest by the right to life religious fanatics in Englehardt Street, Albury, has been tolerated by this community for far too long.The majority of Australians agree that women should have the right to access a legal termination of an unwanted pregnancy (85%), compared to the minority of 8% who do not agree with Australian law (Katherine Betts, People and Place vol. 12, no. 4 2004 page 22). All of those protesting in Englehardt Street are included in this extreme minority of 8%.
Even 72% of Catholics agree that a woman should have the right to choose whether or not she has an abortion.
The protesters claim that they are “a peaceful, prayerful presence”, and claim that termination of an unwanted pregnancy “endangers the physical, and mental wellbeing of the mother, father and all those who are involved”.
Let’s examine some of their claims.
The protesters could pray at home, or any other public place (an alternative offered to them by the Albury City Council), but insist on praying like vultures on the vulnerable women attending the clinic.
They force their inaccurate, alarming and unwanted pamphlets upon women as they try to enter the clinic, assuming they know the circumstances of their visit, in order to “change her mind”. They show vulnerable women a pink plastic foetus, saying: “this is your baby; you are going to kill your baby”!
They profess to be “sidewalk counselors”, but have no qualifications other than their extreme religious views. Their comments could hardly be called “counseling”.
A strict Catholic Albury doctor said to me: “despite personal views about abortion, the protesters in Englehardt Street are assaulting women at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives”.
I believe it is unforgivable to intimidate any person in public on the day of their intended appointment, when any counseling should have been offered privately days before. An offer was made to the protesters to refer all those women who wanted to have counseling to a qualified counselor, but this offer was rejected.
Subjecting women to the protesters’ extreme personal views is the most likely cause of increasing woman’s anxiety and guilt, and there is no evidence that any actually change their minds after listening to the protesters.
The protesters ambition is to close the clinic and to make termination illegal again; both of these will not happen, so their efforts are futile.
The dishonesty of their pamphlets needs to be challenged:
The protesters do not disclose that the overall risks of an early, legal termination of pregnancy in Australia is over 100 times safer for the mother’s physical health than the risks of continuing with an unwanted pregnancy. Mortality since 1979 from legal termination is less than 1:1,000,000, compared to the maternal mortality in Australia after having a birth which is 100: 1,000,000 (Consultative Council of Maternal and Perinatal Mortality Committee).
The protesters do not care about a woman’s dignity or her legal rights; all they care about is their own fanatical personal opinions. They do not care about the reasons why women choose to have a termination; they only care about humiliating them and invading their privacy.
So, how long can the broader community of Albury Wodonga and surrounding districts tolerate the harassment and intimidation by this tiny group of fanatic, religious extremists? This group has not been denied their legal right to protest outside the clinic, but they do not have a moral right to make judgements about another person’s choice.
The protesters show no respect for people who have different opinions from theirs; where is their Christian compassion for another person’s distress? Do we live in a democratic country or not?
The community may understand the passion of their supercilious conviction, but shaming, intimidating and harassing vulnerable women is not helpful to their cause. In fact, the result is community mockery and derision.
The actions of this fanatical, patronizing group of people, brings discredit to their church and to Christianity.
It is time they stopped their weekly protest and time that they started to mind their own business instead of everyone else’s.
2 August 2012, Albury Wodonga News Weekly, ‘Stop the protests’:
“I think they’ve got to be made to feel embarrassed and uncomfortable.
“If the whole community is against them they will stop … they’re not being challenged and I’m going to challenge them.”
Dr Mourik said if the aim of the group was to stop terminations, then women shouldn’t be accosted when leaving the clinic, describing that as “punishment” for their actions.
…
Counsellor Nadia Mellor said she had spoken to between 20 and 30 women traumatised by the protesters and had herself felt intimidated.
“I think with good counselling, most people are able to deal with the decisions they’ve made,” she said.
“What they can’t deal terribly well with is being confronted by these protesters.
“In a small rural area where women could easily be known by the protesters and know that other people then know about their business, that’s traumatising as well.”
See the full article here.
6 September 2012, Albury Wodonga News Weekly, “Anglican leader slams protesters”:
ANTI abortion protesters who meet at the Englehardt Street termination clinic each Thursday have been condemned by the most unlikely of sources.
Father Peter MacLeod-Miller, head of St Matthews Church, says the pro-life group is “off the rails” and putting forward an “unyielding” and harmful agenda.
This evening Albury Police held a mediation meeting between groups involved in the situation on Englehardt Street at the Fertility Control Clinic.
Present were representatives of the ‘Helpers of God’s Precious Infants’, Albury Choice, Albury Council’s enforcement team, residents from the Englehardt Street area, Dr Kathy Lewis from the Fertility Control Clinic, Dr Peter Mourik who supervises medical students who were placed at the clinic, and officers from NSW Police.
Albury Choice presented a simple and reasonable proposal to the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants.
If HoGPI will cease filming and approaching women accessing the clinic, and move their protest away from the entrance of the clinic to the other side of the road, Albury Choice will agree not to be there opposing them.
If the religious group are willing to address these simply issues of privacy, we are prepared to publicly support their right to express their views.
After much obfuscation, the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants rejected this proposal.
They refuse to stop approaching women trying to access the clinic, despite firm Police warnings at tonight’s meeting that such behavior could constitute intimidation.
There was some progress.
HoGPI have agreed not to film women entering the clinic for the time being.
There was also discussion of a compromise proposal to minimise the sense of confrontation on Englehardt Street.
The proposal was that HoGPI’s ‘counsellors’ would keep more distance from the clinic and be less agressive in their approach to women heading to the clinic; and that Albury Choice supporters would maintain more distance from the HoGPI gathering.
No specifics were agreed on, it does however offer a basis for avoiding situations that Albury Police indicated they intend to respond to robustly.
HoGPI seem determined to continue their harassment of women seeking to access the Fertility Control Clinic on Englehardt Street. Tomorrow, Albury Choice supporters will be on Englehardt Street opposing the harassment and intimidation of women seekings to access a lawful and legitimate medical service.
A fuller report on what happened, the issues raised and the dynamics at play in tonights meeting will be made at the next Albury Choice meeting.
TOMORROW’S ACTION
Tomorrow a group of religious fundamentalists will once again be intimidating and harassing women seeking to access the Fertility Control Clinic on Englehardt Street in Albury. We know that a small but determined counter-presence can really disrupt their activities.
When we are present, they are concerned that people are watching and listening to what they do. We know that when we aren’t there, the religious fundamentalists are even more offensive and threatening to women.
Can you make it to the clinic for an hour tomorrow? In particular we have a bit of a gap in our presence from 10.30am to 11.30am.
MEDIATION UPDATE
As many of you know, two weeks back we were approached by Albury Police, who requested we participate in a mediation session on the issue of “activites and incidents surrounding the Albury Fertility Control Clinic”.
We met last Wednesday to discuss the Police request, adopt a negotiating position, and appoint delegates to participate in the process. I’ve since recieved a letter from Albury Police informing me that the mediation session will be held on the 31st of August.
More updates when I recieve them.
Hope to see some or all of you tomorrow.
in solidarity,
Kieran Bennett
Secretary
Albury Choice
There are pressing issues that we need to discuss as a group. I encourage all Albury Choice participants to join me on Wednesday, at 5.30pm at the Activities Room at the Albury Library-Museum.
Albury HoGPI participant Roland von Marburg is holding a talk on abortion. He is once again trying to use his status as a medical practitioner to intervene in public debates on the side of religious fundamentalism.
In this flyer for the talk, he is described rather grandly as a “specialist surgeon”.
But Roland von Marburg is not a specialist in any field related to women’s health, fertility, pregnancy or children. He Is an ear nose and throat specialist.
In 2003 this is what the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria had to say about Roland von Marburg’s practice as an ENT:
Pursuant to s. 45(A)(2)(c) of the Medical Practice Act 1994 (as amended) the Panel
reprimands Mr Von Marburg for: failing to exercise care and skill in applying bandages to his
patients’ head that were too tight; failing to provide his patients an appropriate post-operative
management plan; failing to appreciate and respond to the post-operative pain experienced
by his patients and failing to appreciate the post-operative complications and respond to
them by appropriate referral.
The full judgement can be read here, it makes for damning reading.
Roland von Marburg’s practice as an Ear Nose and Throat specialist remains subject to a number of conditions.
From the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency:
Dr Von Marburg must not prescribe, possess, supply, administer, handle or dispense any drug of addiction
Registration is also subject to conditions that relate to personal health. These conditions are not publicly available due to privacy considerations.
None of this changes the fact that Roland von Marburg is entitled to an opinion as a private citizen. But when it comes to lecturing on the issue of abortion, von Marburg is acting outside his area of expertise. His fundamentalist views should be given no greater credence simply because of his (questionable) status as a medical practitioner.
The so-called Helper’s of God’s Precious Infants continue to harass and intimidate women seeking to access the Fertility Control Clinic on Englehardt Street in Albury.
But they don’t have the free reign they once enjoyed. The Albury Choice campaign is now into it’s third month, and the religious fundamentalists are starting to get frustrated.
Some of them are terribly nice, others not so. After an afternoon of hearing various HoGPIs tell women entering the clinic that they were killing their babies, I was told I was also a “baby murdering f-cking bitch”. – Kate
I witnessed one of their pamphetlers follow a young man out of the clinic and 200 metres down the street. – Kate
We continue to receive strong support from the wider community. Passers-by cheered the pro-choice gathering, told the religious fundamentalists to “go back to church”, and honked in support of the clinic defence.
On more than one occasion, the friends or family of people accessing the clinic came outside to thank the clinic defenders for their work. Moments like these make the day worthwhile.
I have no doubt that next Thursday the religious fundamentalists of HoGPI will be back. They will setup outside the clinic, with their posters purporting to show foetuses, handing out disgusting and misleading pamphlets, whilst trying to stop, obstruct and harass women accessing the clinic.
But they wont succeed. Because we will stand between them and the people they try and harass, we will block any cameras they setup, and we’ll hold banners in front of graphic signage. If you have an hour free on Thursday, why not join us? Come down to Englehardt St any time between 10am and 3pm, and see how religious fundamentalists continue to assault the rights of women.
- Kieran