I've experienced aggressive anti-abortion protesters. The Colorado shootings should be our final warning to crack down on their intimidation

Victoria in Australia just set up buffer zones around family planning clinics. We'd protect anyone else receiving harassment for a medical procedure - so why are we still reticent on this?

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Recently, outside a family planning clinic in West London, I was harassed by a group of anti-abortion protesters. Around 15 people - mostly men over 40 – were grouped outside the health centre like a judgemental Greek chorus. They handed me a leaflet that began ‘Mum, please choose life for your baby!’

It was pouring with rain but they had come prepared with laminated posters bearing slogans like ‘Abortion wounds fathers too’. One of the men told me that abortion causes cancer (it doesn’t), and another one stood silently and filmed me on his phone. As it happens, I was there for something other than an abortion – but they still managed to make me feel self-conscious, vulnerable and intimidated.

If you or a partner wants to access an abortion in the UK there’s a good chance you’ll have to deal with this, as around half of all abortion clinics are regularly targeted now, according to the BBC. And while, thankfully, the situation in the UK is not as extreme and deeply sad as in some parts of the US - as Friday’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado showed - anti-abortion groups in the UK are having an impact on health centre staff and women accessing services, and they are gaining in strength and numbers.

Elsewhere, women have begun pushing back. MPs in Victoria, Australia voted this week to tackle such intimidating behaviour by imposing ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics. The new law doesn’t stop people who disagree with abortion expressing their views; it simply means these groups are not allowed to carry out their actions within 150 metres of a clinic, and if they do so repeatedly they could face fines or prison. Similar laws have already been implemented in Canada, South Africa and some American states.

The cry for buffer zones in the UK has been getting steadily louder and now many groups - from Mumsnet to The Fatherhood Institute and the British Humanist Society - are supporting a campaign for them called Back Off, and MPs Caroline Lucas and Yvette Cooper have expressed support.

Access to abortion is a legal right – it has been for 48 years – and women should be able to access medical services without feeling intimidated. But large numbers can’t. Across the UK, on any given day, groups of people are standing outside abortion clinics passing judgement on the women who enter, thrusting didactic leaflets into their hands and holding up placards depicting graphic images of foetuses. And that’s at the better end of the behaviour scale.

These groups are causing harm, and there’s ample evidence to prove it. Organisations that run abortion clinics, like the British Parental Advisory Service (BPAS), have been speaking out about the impact on women for several years. Recently academics at the University of Aston looked at feedback from over 200 women who’d faced such groups on their way into a clinic. They found overwhelmingly that their presence caused significant distress and that women were made to feel that their privacy had been violated. And this was when their behaviour was legal: several women reported being followed down the street and one said she was assaulted.

In the UK, if a woman feels harassed she can of course call the police, but because of the vulnerable nature of the situation women rarely do, and when they do call there is very little the police can do.

This is quite simply an issue of harassment. If we believe people should have the right to access medical care with privacy and without intimidation, we should follow in Australia’s footsteps and implement buffer zones too. We wouldn’t accept it if people took exception to any other medical procedure, and by failing to properly curtail intimidation outside family planning establishments, we implicitly say that abortion is still everybody’s business – rather than the singular business of the woman choosing to have one.