McHugh has also noticed a huge difference in her patients since the introduction of the PSPO.

“What we’re noticing now is that it’s just not an issue any more,” she said. “We’re not finding women coming in distressed.”

Anti-abortion groups who congregate outside clinics say that they aim to provide alternatives to women who may feel uncertain about whether they should go ahead with an abortion.



Staff we met at the Ealing clinic said that women have usually made up their minds by the time they see them, and that counselling is provided to women, before and after the procedure, to ensure they are comfortable with their decision. Around 20% of women who make an initial appointment don’t go ahead with the procedure at both Marie Stopes and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which together provide the majority of abortions in the UK.

Rather than offer support to women seeking abortion, clinic staff say, the presence of anti-abortion groups outside clinics gets in the way of women accessing medical care anonymously and without judgment. “You can go to the dentist and no one’s going to stop you going in,” O’Brien said.

McHugh said that as a midwife, it was not her role to convince women whether or not to have an abortion.

“We’re healthcare providers and you don’t ever think when you become a nurse, midwife, or doctor that you’re going to have to shield your clients from cruelty,” she said.

“It’s never going to be a pleasant day, because it’s never pleasant when you need to access some kind of medical procedure, but in terms of people’s decisions, they’ve already been made by the time they get to us,” she continued.

“If they need to access counselling, we offer that, or any support that’s required,” McHugh continued. “It doesn’t help to have someone call you a murderer or say, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t kill me.’ We can’t possibly assess the long-term psychological effect this is having on women.”

But while the PSPO at the Ealing Marie Stopes clinic means that women in seeking abortion there will no longer encounter anti-abortion groups, staff and patients at clinics across the country continue to report harassment, including being followed and verbally abused by protesters. In 2017, an anti-abortion group broadcast their demonstration outside BPAS's Hastings clinic to Facebook live, which many worried would compromise the anonymity of women using the clinic.

A BPAS spokesperson told us that the service’s clinics in Richmond, Bournemouth, Manchester, and Birmingham also regularly have anti-abortion protesters at their doors, while Marie Stopes clinics in Manchester and Birmingham remain targets.

“They were praying with crosses and rosary beads. I started to cry immediately — they made me feel like I was doing something wrong,” a woman seeking treatment at BPAS’s Bournemouth clinic last month told staff.

Family members accompanying women to their appointments have also been made to feel uncomfortable. “They were standing right by the main entrance, praying for all the babies that were going to be killed,” a relative of a woman accessing BPAS services in Bournemouth recently said. “It feels as if they are trying to intimidate or guilt-trip women who are in a vulnerable state and don’t need that.”



Anna Veglio-White, cofounder of Sister Supporter, the campaign group that led efforts to lobby Ealing council to introduce a PSPO, told BuzzFeed News that it is pushing for similar measures at abortion clinics elsewhere.

“Women and pregnant people may or may not be tormented depending on the location of the clinic they are sent to,” she said.