A woman in jail because she protests abortion

Pro-abortion fear mongering often raises the false notion that pro-lifers want women to go to jail for having abortions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let the record stand: For women in jail because of abortion, there’s only one in this country that I know of, and she’s pro-life.

Linda Gibbons is a soft spoken grandmother whose trial is today. Gibbons has spent years in jail because she protests abortion. From a source who has seen her working:

She has been peacefully standing in front of [an abortion clinic] for the past five years handing out pamphlets and talking to women. Often only allowed an hour at a time before a peace officer warns her three times and then calls the police for her disobedience of the injunction [that does not allow protesting within a 60 foot zone outside of abortion clinics.]

Today is her trial, and the results are due out momentarily. My source further tells me:

This is the first time she has legal representation and her argument is being made. All the other times she simply stays silent, even when questioned by the judge, in order to make a political statement that the unborn are voiceless. …She is always charged with  obstruction of the peace officer’s duties (despite the fact that she fully cooperates and listens to his warnings and goes along with the arrest subsequently when he calls the police). But why is this 14-year-old injunction that was intended to be temporary still enforced and used to prosecute a peaceful pro-lifer?

And that is a very good question.

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Brigitte updates: She has been acquitted.

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Andrea adds: The story Brigitte links to quotes one Maria Corsillo. If I’m not mistaken, we were on the same TV program back when Morgentaler got his Order of Canada. And she wouldn’t stop talking. But bygones, this is what she says on this case:

“No one has a Charter right to interfere in another person’s medical care,” said Maria Corsillo, manager of The Scott Clinic, which opened in 1986. “The question every patient asks is, ‘Why is she allowed to do that?’” People are entitled to their beliefs but they should not impose them on others, she said. She used the example of people opposing blood transfusions for religious reasons. “Do you see those people standing and obstructing entrances to blood donor clinics?”

Short answer, and it’s an easy one. First of all, Gibbons doesn’t block entry. She stands quietly by, as the justice who acquitted her highlights. Secondly, if those opposed to blood transfusions want to stand and offer me information outside my very hospital room, I’m not opposed to that. I’d weigh the evidence and decide they’re crazy. Done. Women can, incidentally, as thinking beings, do the same, Ms. Corsillo.

Finally, abortion is but rarely medical treatment, and taking a life to solve a problem constitutes a very callous sort of world, one where it makes sense to protest. When Corsillo and I discussed Morgentaler’s Order of Canada, I recall she opened by saying it was an appointment that everyone could support. Everyone. Interesting. Guess working in a clinic, with a husband who does the abortions means you are by default out of touch with mainstream women’s concerns, which tend not to revolve around “medical treatment” but rather, “I can’t have this baby.” Cutting freedoms, freedom of speech and freedom of information–that’s her MO. Thing is, she’s curtailed her own world so much, she doesn’t even know when she’s doing it.

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