I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know as ‘Scotland’ and thus would have no jurisdiction over my life. This is, I grant, a solipsistic attitude to have taken – and I realise that now it has been shattered.
A new and unwanted homunculus has slipped into my life, then, and I fear it is time to talk about the smirking, pudding-faced Green MSP on account of her member’s bill, The Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scot-land), which has been enacted. It is not just me who is waking up to Gillian, but the American Vice-President J.D. Vance as well.
Mackay’s bill bans people from protesting within 200 metres of an abortion clinic. It bans them from not protesting, too: just standing 200 metres from an abortion clinic is enough to bring you to the attention of the law. Mackay has no qualms about the severity of the law and said: ‘This kind of intimidation has no place in a modern or progressive Scotland. Everybody deserves to have access to healthcare without harassment.’ By intimidation she means standing silently, perhaps with a placard, perhaps without.
It was Mackay’s bill to which Vance referred when he addressed European leaders at that security conference in Munich. Vance made the outlandish claim that the Scottish government had written to people who lived near the clinic warning them that they were not allowed to pray inside their own homes, for fear of offending women gaily passing by on their way to the abortion clinic.
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