THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501270020
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
John Salvi may have been the ill wind that blows good news if state legislators finally enact legislation to protect women's access to abortion clinics.
The violent acts with which he was charged earlier this month - shooting at Norfolk's Hillcrest Clinic and shooting two Massachusetts abortion-clinic workers to death - have added urgency to a bill co-sponsored by Del. Howard Copeland, a Democrat from Norfolk.
His proposed legislation cleared the hurdle of the House of Delegates last week, thanks to a decisive vote by Del. Anne Rhodes of Richmond, the sole House Republican to join the Democrats in approval.
Opponents of the measure deny the need for special protection of abortion clinics from coercive or violent tactics. They decry it as a suppression of free speech and a duplication of criminal laws that are already on the books and applicable to any public place.
Certainly the right to free speech must be protected. Opponents of abortion cannot be barred from protesting its morality, its legality, its practice. They may protest lawfully with impunity.
Or they may protest unlawfully, by illegal but nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, and accept the legal - and political - consequences. Though the U.S. Su-preme Court has permitted states some limits on abortion, no ruling to date permits a state, much less a private citizen, to block the entrance to a clinic or to trespass on its property or to menace its staff or clients.
No constitution of which we're aware protects violent acts as free speech. The constitutional protections of which we are all aware include the freedom to persuade but not license to coerce; the right to protest, plus the right to pass protesters by. The ugly protesters on the fringe of the anti-abortion movement target not malls or McDonald's or theaters or grocery stores, but health-care clinics, their staffs and their clients. Just as with telephones, automobiles, computers and copy machines, new circumstances in health care can spawn new crimes, and occasion the need for new laws, new security, new approaches.
And, sadly, the approach that most needs emphasis gets the least. Our attention and energy would be better applied fighting the need for abortion than fighting the right to it. by CNB