Three days a week, as I drive away from a medical research trial at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, I face a protest designed to distress and intimidate women. As a woman, it sickens me.
The gaggle of anti-abortionists, from the US-funded organisation 40 Days of Life, stand at the T-junction near the hospital’s maternity and gynaecology unit. They are usually men or older women and they carry passive-aggressive placards proclaiming “Women do regret abortion”, and “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you”.
It is 2022. It’s unbelievable we are subject to such emotional blackmail — a chilling import from the US, where fundamentalists are depriving women of control of their own bodies.
In the UK this debate was settled 50 years ago. Today’s protesters are a tiny, totalitarian minority, yet they are publicly harassing law-abiding women accessing legal healthcare.
Why aren’t our progressive, supposedly feminist politicians protecting ordinary women and the NHS staff who care for them? Where are the buffer zones to push these extremists into irrelevance? If transgender patients were being intimidated, it would be a different story.
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The government, said to be wary of legal action, has apparently convened (heavy sigh) a working group with Cosla (the councils’ umbrella group), the police, councils and health boards “To find an appropriate way forward as soon as possible”.
Yeah right. A cowardly response that ensures the protest will continue until its planned end on April 10, to coincide with Lent.
Walk for the bees
A thrilling moment in the sunshine yesterday: I saw my first bumblebee of the year, feeding on the crocuses. Especially so because I have joined the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and now possess a fab crib sheet for identification.
My sighting, I can boast like a novice bird-watcher identifying a robin, was a white-tailed bumblebee, and I don’t care how common it is. It is my first bee.
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Members of the trust are urged to do a monthly walk, along the same mile-long route, counting, identifying and logging the bees. I’m contemplating which of my friends to victimise by asking them to join me. How can they possibly refuse?
Divisive census
Filling in the census on yesterday’s deadline, I find myself in some sympathy with critical Times letter writers. Some questions were illogical and hard not to interpret as divisive. Am I “Scots” or “other British”? Neither. Or rather, both. I’m just British. The other puzzle was whether you understand, speak, read and write Scots. Help, I thought, I struggle with Burns. But the question, the notes explained, included Glaswegian, Dun-donian, Shetland, Borders and Lallans. Everything from an accent to an established language, in other words, which is barmy. Do I get Billy Connolly, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid? All of them, yes, and please, I just want Scotland to carry on being my quiet, kind, non-divisive, tolerant home.
This way up
Twitter is having a countryside moment, carrying grave advice on what to do if you find a sheep stuck on its back, legs in the air. As a teenager working on a Borders sheep farm, I learnt the gloriously abbreviated noun “cowpy”, pronounced cowp-ee, for this very situation. As in “there’s twa cowpies ahind the brow of the hill, go right them”. Does that make me fluent in Lallans?
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It’s time to shout
The Scottish health and social care charity ARC has launched a scheme to empower people with disabilities to get involved in decisions about their lives. This is the first time people with support needs have been able to sign up, have their voice heard, shape services and influence change. It’s called the national involvement network. Join, everyone, and shout.