On bubble zones: A reconsideration October 1995 by Kay Stockholder The BCCLA initially opposed the legislation that put in place bubble zones around free-standing abortion clinics and the private residences and professional offices of doctors and health care workers involved in providing abortions. Two months later we changed our position, and announced our support for the legislation. Because this might be seen as having been occasioned by considerations that are irrelevant to civil libertarian concerns, we want to make clear the thinking involved in the process of our deliberations. Why has the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the provincial organization most explicitly dedicated to free speech as the most fundamental of civil liberties, endorsed the new abortion clinic bubble zone legislation? Civil libertarians have always been dedicated to protecting the privacy of citizens in their civic and cultural life from undue government regulation. The present issue is particularly difficult because it concerns the encroachment upon the privacy of one group of citizens (those seeking abortions) by another (those demonstrating against the practice of abortion). Legislation creating bubble zones opposes two civil liberties issues: the right to free speech of the anti-abortionists, and the rights to privacy of those seeking abortions (as well as their rights of access to legal abortions). It can be argued that the offense caused to those seeking and providing abortions should not be grounds for government intervention, as long as those giving offense do not break the law. Being offended or feeling harassed are subjective states of mind, and as such dubious grounds upon which to curb freedom of speech. But in this situation, we judge that the need to protect other civil liberties outweighs any damage done by restrictions on the manner and place of speech. The intervention in citizens’ relations amongst themselves does not go beyond that involved in legislation against stalking, for example. A different issue is at stake for bubble zones around the private dwellings and offices of those involved in providing abortion services than for bubble zones around free-standing abortion clinics. In the case of private offices and homes, the demonstrations threaten to become a permanent feature of the lives of those in the neighbourhood, as well as the colleagues and patients of those whose offices are in professional buildings. The move to picketing private homes and offices undercuts the normal protection that is due to speech in the public forum, since it goes no distance in extending the public debate on the abortion issue. It is intended only to make doctors and service providers pay so high a price that they cease offering their services. Bubble zones around clinics involve more pressing rights to free speech: the anti-abortionists are trying to dissuade people from doing what is in their eyes an immoral act, and it is not the business of the law to protect people from feeling harassed or intimidated by the expression of views which offend them. However, there is a gray area in which it is difficult to determine when speech crosses the line into assaultive action, and it is clear that the demonstrators see it as their business to flirt with this boundary. In consequence, those seeking abortions are subject to continuing behaviour which, in the eyes of reasonable persons, certainly constitutes harassment and intimidation, even when any single instance of such behaviour might stay just on the right side of the law. In contrast to the anti-abortion demonstrators, those seeking abortions are not engaged in public or political activity. Quite the contrary: their actions concern a most intimate aspect of their private lives, while unfortunately subjecting them to public view and scrutiny. For example, while it is not illegal to take pictures of people in public, and while one would not want to invite any legislation designed to restrict that practice in general, it is the right of those seeking abortions to maintain a measure of confidentiality; this right is compromised when pictures are taken of those entering or leaving clinics. The women involved are particularly vulnerable, some being very young, at a life-crisis, and facing a procedure that involves complex psychological and emotional factors even under the best of conditions. In our view, this compromise of privacy rights outweighs the infringement of the place and manner of free expression necessary to protect the patients. As well, the unique combination of unusual factors brought together in this issue provides assurance that this legislation will not be used as a precedent in apparently similar circumstances (for example, labour disputes). In order to preserve a correct balance between these competing rights, we have recommended that the bubble zones around clinics be so designed that placards and signs at their perimeters can be seen by those inside the zones. We also recommend that the police continue to use the admirable discretion they have shown in ignoring such symbolically politically but literally private actions as silent prayer in the restricted zones. In the heat of this debate, it must not be forgotten that our society has benefited by virtue of people being willing to devote their time and energy to causes about which they feel strongly and which do not immediately concern their personal welfare. Whether or not one agrees with any specific position, such behaviour in traditional moral parlance is public-spirited and disinterested. Neither side in this impassioned and complex controversy should be indifferent to the rights of their adversaries. Women today are able to claim abortion rights because of those women and men in the past who exercised their civil liberties to demand such rights, spoke out in circumstances in which many—both inside and outside government—sought to silence them. Circumstances and applications change with time; if one loses concern for freedom of speech for those with whom one disagrees, one erodes one’s own power to defend those causes one espouses.