Wholly Consumed With Her Anti-Abortion Tableau

"Do you understand the court order?"
"Linda, do you understand?"
"Linda, you're in breach of a court order."
"[The subject's conduct was inclusive of ] impeding, interfering with, blocking and obstruction [clinic patients]; distracting [or] attempting to distract [or otherwise] interrupting [the business of the clinic]; supporting or condoning [actions that might interrupt the business]."
Toronto Sheriff

"You arrest me while allowing the murder of babies? You have blood on your hands."
"The Supreme Court says the one you want to say you're defending doesn't exist ... Nobody is there until the baby is born."                                                          "I’ve been in prison [on and off] for 10 years and I’m willing to spend another 10 years behind bars. I have a moral responsibility not to obey an unjust law."
Linda Gibbons, 67, Toronto abortion protester

Dave Chan for National Post   Anti-abortion activist Linda Gibbons at the Supreme Court of Canada in December 2011.

"Ms. Gibbons still stands charged with disobeying an 18-year-old temporary court order."
"This is an abuse of process, and she will continue to pursue that argument in the courts."
Daniel Cantor, lawyer for the defence

Linda Gibbons is a resident of Toronto, a woman who has made it her personal campaign not to turn the other way while women in Toronto seek abortions to end pregnancies they have no intention of seeing through to maturity and the birth of a child. It has become her personal campaign, to picket abortion clinics. the socially and politically-charged issue of abortion is now considered a medical procedure in Canada, nothing more, nothing less.

A foetus is not a child, irrespective of the number of anti-abortion critics asserting that ending a pregnancy is tantamount to murder.

Protests in Canada at one time turned violently ugly, seeing people with criminal intent pursuing health professionals who provided abortion services to women who felt they needed and wanted them. Vicious harassment took place in front of abortion clinics when women attempted to enter on their way to ending a pregnancy were accosted by raging protesters. Ms. Gibbons herself has never been violent in her preoccupation with condemning women seeking abortions.

She has quietly gone about what she considers to be her business, that of expressing her profound dismay at the taking of human life, for she considers foetuses to be living children, not yet introduced to independent life outside the womb. Three years ago, she appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to strike down the the charge laid against her under the Criminal Code for picketing too close to a Toronto abortion clinic.

By that time she was already well known for her personal campaign denouncing abortion. She had by then spent years in prison as an outcome of defying a legal injunction against anyone picketing technically too close to an abortion clinic. An injunction that was put into law after the country had grappled with violent incidents targeting abortion providers. The Supreme Court ruled by an eight to one margin rejecting her argument that she should not have been charged under the Criminal Code.

Anti-abortion protesters take part in the National March for Life demonstration on Parliament Hill in Ottawa May 10. One of Canada's most active anti-abortion protesters has lost an appeal of a criminal charge to the Supreme Court of Canada. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Her contention was that it would have been more legally appropriate to charge her under civil law in the matter of disobeying a court order. Charged under Section 127 of the Criminal Code, as a federal offence she was imprisoned. Her argument held no sway with the justices of the Supreme Court. She has continued over the years to defy the law, and there are many other Canadians who think the way she does and take the trouble once a year to express their concerns, in an annual march on Parliament Hill.

They suffer no prosecutorial consequences, since protesting as they do is not against any law in Canada, where free speech is held to reign supreme (more or less). But it is Linda Gibbons and she alone who persists in carrying her plaintive sign ("Why mom? When I have so much love to give") and insists on doing so, quietly and without ostentation, outside Toronto abortion clinics, with the full knowledge and seemingly oblivious to the reality that she will be charged once again with a criminal offence.

As was done, when the scenario played out on Wednesday when Ms. Gibbons headed, sign at the ready, to the Morgentaler clinic in North Toronto. There she repeated her little pantomime, walking a few steps back and forth before the clinic, leaving herself a sitting duck for the response she well knows from experience that will be forthcoming. The clinic has an active security detail in reflection of the potential harm that can come to people seeking its services and those providing them.

Shortly after Ms. Gibbons' appearance Garda security agency vehicles rolled up to confront the woman. They called the police and the police called the provincial sheriff's office who is tasked with enforcing the injunction establishing the offence. The sheriff arrived to read the injunction aloud to the malefactor in question, upon which the way was clear for the police to make their move. Ms. Gibbon was bundled into a police car and taken to 55 Division pending a court appearance the following day.

Peter J. Thompson/National Post  Abortion protester Linda Gibbons is arrested out front of the Morgentaler Clinic in Toronto after a silent protest, Wednesday September 2, 2015. 

 

The Supreme Court of Canada back in 1988 struck down Canada's abortion law which made it illegal and a criminal offence, for anyone to have an abortion other than under strict medical conditions. In 1992 another Morgentaler clinic had been firebombed. Three doctors in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia were shot at, in attempts at murder because they were abortion providers. A clinic in Vancouver was broken into and its medical equipment destroyed. The injunction came into law in 1989.

This woman has thus far spent a total of ten years and seven months in prison as punishment for breaking this particular law. She claims to be willing to spend even more time incarcerated, since in her considered opinion the issue is of too great and encompassing a moral blight on society for her to simply behave as though it doesn't exist. She is a mother and grandmother, her own mother still lives, and her commitment to alerting the public to the great harm as she sees it, being done to unborn lives is total.

Her righteous intransigence speaks to her convictions, and she is not amenable to turning away from her campaign. Let her campaign. Allow her to speak her mind. No reaction to her actions will serve to dissuade her from what she sees as her duty to this particular view of human rights. And she has a right, feeling a moral obligation to harass and make people feel guilt over their entitled decisions. Where will it stop?

When fascists like the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, take control of the levers of public condemnation of private choices.