GRH won't apply for safe access zone, executive director at SHORE Centre disagrees
The safe access zone law aims to help protect women's safety and privacy when accessing abortion services
Grand River Hospital says it will not apply for a safe access zone for its Freeport Campus facility, despite a new provincial law that now can prohibit protest within a 50-metre radius of an abortion clinic or health facility that provides abortion services.
The new safe access zone law, or Safe Access to Abortion Services Act, is intended to help protect women's safety and privacy when accessing abortion services.
Health facilities can now apply to be a safe access zone and extend the protected radius up to 150 metres.
- New law allows for larger safe zone for abortion providers, but LHSC says they don't need it
- Safe zones around abortion clinics now in place
But GRH's CEO Malcom Maxwell said having a safe access zone at the Freeport campus will not change the experience for those accessing abortion services or for staff.
"The only reason we haven't applied for it is that we're not sure that, in the circumstances at Freeport, we've ever had a circumstance that was close enough to the hospital that the access zone would make any difference to the experience of women coming or going from the clinic, or staff," Maxwell told CBC News.
'Everyone is impacted'
Maxwell said they have tried to monitor concerns that have been raised over the last several years, but the concerns they have been made aware of have occurred off the property.
But Lyndsey Butcher, executive director at the SHORE Centre, said she was shocked to hear that GRH would not apply for a safe access zone.
She said they've heard concerns from people accessing abortion services at the hospital's Freeport Campus.
"Every one is impacted when they drive by," Butcher told CBC News.
"We don't just hear from women who've had abortions. We hear from women who are going in for breast cancer treatment or palliative care, people who are triggered when they drive by from an abortion they may have had 20, 30, 40 years ago."
Protesters as the number one concern
Butcher adds that passing by protesters on the way to their appointment is the number one concern they hear from individuals they work with.
"I can't understand why Freeport is not applying for the safe access zone for their patients' safety and the safety of their staff and visitors who are going to the clinic," she said.
Maxwell said the hospital would apply for the safe access zone if it would change the people's experience coming to or from Freeport Campus, but protesters would still have the right to protest off hospital property.
"The activities that have happened across the [street] that some people who are travelling to or from would see and perhaps feel uncomfortable, those wouldn't change in any way because the people who are carrying them out there would continue to have the right to carry them" he said.