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Pro-Life Counsellors Worry That a New Law Will Make Their Task Harder : 24th Jun 09
”The walk from the No. 6 subway station to Dr. Emily’s Women’s Health Center, in the South Bronx, New York, is only a few steps long, past the Congress Pharmacy, the Gabriel jewelry shop and Marina’s Beauty Salon. But to finally get in means passing by the likes of Julie Beyel. Chelsy Tracz, 19, Sean Murphy, 20, and Julie Beyel, 32, wait with leaflets outside the Bronx abortion clinic, hoping to dissuade people from going in.
Ms. Beyel, a 32-year-old with wavy brown hair and a purple T-shirt, stood outside the clinic, and beamed a smile at an approaching woman. ‘Miss?’ Ms. Beyel said, her smile widening. ‘I just want you to know that there are alternatives’.
Hour after hour, several days a week, Ms. Beyel tries to engage women who come to New York City abortion clinics with pamphlets and pleas. On Wednesday a police officer drove up to the front of Dr. Emily’s in his squad car, talked with Ms. Beyel briefly, and then drove away. Ms. Beyel said the officer had told her that the clinic staff had called police, saying that the activists were preventing women from entering the building.
About 80,000 abortions are done annually in New York City, according to state health statistics, but these days it is far from the center of the national abortion debate.
The city is not known for abortion-related violence, and when an abortion provider is shot dead, as was Dr. George R. Tiller in Wichita, Kan., last Sunday, it can feel like it happened in another country.
But 36 years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion war goes on, even in a small way in New York, where next month, a new city law will take effect that could make it easier for anti-abortion demonstrators to be arrested if they restrict access to a clinic or harass people attempting to enter.
The law currently allows the police to make arrests only if the person directly affected—usually a woman entering a clinic for an abortion—is willing to press charges. The new law allows third parties, such as clinic workers, to press charges if they witness the activity.
The sidewalk counsellors, as Ms. Beyel and her fellow demonstrators call themselves, say they are afraid they will be unfairly prosecuted”. New York Times. June 9.
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