Walk On The Wildside |
By Moira Rayner
The East Melbourne Fertility Clinic on Wellington Parade has been a thorn in the side for many people over many, many years.
Bertram Wainer, a whistle blowing doctor, set it up to challenge authorities and Victoria's Victorian criminal laws which made all abortion illegal and backyard abortion racket's rife.
The clinic is privately owned now. Abortion to save the life and health of the mother has been legal since the 1970s. Abortion was formally legitimized later by State government legislation.
Yet the East Melbourne Fertility Clinic continues to be a site of controversy and confrontation, a challenge to the public's right of unimpeded access to our local post office, chemist, dry cleaner or government and private businesses up and down that little bit of run-down road.
Why? Because if they happen to be female and young, they are beset by anti-abortion protestors. Or they are beset by pamphleteers and pray-ers, who have picketed the joint, legal and not legal, for decades.
And sometimes the police are called, and sometimes a council officer comes along and has a look and on one particularly idiotic occasion, issued an infringement notice to the partner of one of the Clinic's patients for 'littering' - he threw away a pamphlet.
The only charges ever laid by the frequently visiting police seem to be against a security guard for an alleged assault on a protestor. Another security guard was shot and killed by a madman attracted to the 'right-to-life' challenge the Clinic posed.
The only light on the hill has been the presence of 'Friends of the East Melbourne Fertility Clinic' who have voluntarily protected women and men who want to use its services, and to seek to reason with the protestors.
Shouts about 'killing your baby' and verbal, and sometimes physical protests (I've seen them) have further traumatised women who are already hurt by their difficult decisions.
No effective action has been taken by the Clinic, the Council or the Police (they are all 'going to get advice' and then not share it) to deal with the countless confrontations affecting clients, passers-by and local residents.
The East Melbourne Group has met and talked with all of those who could do something but haven't worked out how or when or by whom. There is no safe access to the Clinic and none of them including the Clinic (which surely has a duty of care to its patients) the Melbourne City Council (which has a statutory duty to protect the amenity of East Melbourne) or Victoria Police (to enforce the law) are willing to act.
This has to stop! I know I am not alone in wanting to stroll to the Post Office or the pharmacy unimpeded by protestors outside the clinic who have the effect of rubbing the people of East Melbourne up the wrong way for more reasons than one.
WALK ON THE WILD SIDE
Summer 2012
❊ Address ❊
⊜ 118 Wellington Parade East Melbourne 3002 View Map
❊ Web Links ❊
➼ Walk On The Wildside
➼ Source: PDF - emg.org.au
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