Journalist Sunny Hundal had been filming a group of anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic in London on Wednesday when a pregnant passerby stepped forward to confront the demonstrators gathered and left everyone speechless.
Hundal had been asking a protester who had a camera on him whether or not he’d been filming women coming in and out of the clinic. The protesters began denying this claim, when the pregnant woman, who’d been observing the scene, suddenly spoke up.
“It’s wrong what you’re doing. You don’t know why people are doing what they’re doing but you want to be out here judging and filming,” she said, her voice rising. “You’re standing out here making other people feel guilty … Many people have been abused, you don’t know what their reasons [are]. I think this is so wrong on so many levels.”
The woman, who has yet to be identified, later said she works for a nearby charity called Kids Company UK, an organization that provides support to inner-city children. “This is the wrong place to be located, especially when we have our people that are going through their shit, coming to visit us at Kids Company where we're meant to help, then they’re meant to see this,” she told the demonstrators.
“We work with girls that have been abused, molested, and you've got this on," she added. "You get raped … and then you tell me what you do after that."
Kids Company UK confirmed to The Huffington Post that the woman works for the group. A representative said the worker is not currently speaking to the media.
Hundal captured a video of the woman’s words, and shared it on YouTube this week. The clip has since been viewed more than 650,000 times, with some netizens hailing the woman as a “hero.” (Skip to around 1:07 in the video to get right to the woman’s interjection.)
According to Hundal, the protesters outside the clinic, said to be run by the British Pregnancy Advice Service, are part of an anti-abortion activist group called Abort67.
“Britain does not offer legal protection to women’s health services from anti-abortion activists,” the journalist wrote in a blog post last month. “[Abort67] has exploited this gap in the law and, over the last few weeks, confronted women going into the [clinic] with graphic posters and leaflets with pictures of dismembered fetuses. They have also been filming patients coming in and out of the practice without asking for their consent.”
Hundal told BuzzFeed that while he believes anti-abortion groups have a right to express their beliefs, “they shouldn’t be intimidating women as they are now.”
For its part, Abort67 has defended its actions, telling The Daily Mail this week: “The YouTube video by Sunny Hundal which reveals the gentle nature by which we hold our displays serves to emphasize that abortion is indefensible. Pro-aborts like Sunny can’t defend killing small human beings so he tries (in vain) to shame our volunteers for trying to defend the unborn child.”
Though this video was filmed in the United Kingdom, there have also been recent incidents of protesters in the United States infringing on a woman’s ability to go safely in and out of reproductive health clinics.
Earlier this year, disturbing undercover audio of a training session conducted by anti-abortion activists revealed the tactics used by such groups in Texas to dissuade patients from obtaining an abortion. “You track license plates ... coming into any abortion facility," an activist is heard saying in the audio clip. "We have a very sophisticated spreadsheet, everybody keeps track. This way you can track whether or not a client comes back.”
This post has been updated to include confirmation from Kids Company UK.
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