This proposal is not novel; Ms Patten based her plan on Tasmania's 150-metre exclusion zones, which were introduced two years ago. And the ACT may follow suit: Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury tabled similar, draft legislation in the Assembly last month, also based on the Tasmanian laws.

On the face of it, it is difficult to argue against moves to protect women from coercion and abuse, particularly patients who may be vulnerable emotionally. This newspaper has long supported the right of women to access safe abortion services and believes that people who try to intimidate women into avoiding these clinics are morally simplistic, show a repugnant disregard for privacy and potentially cause deep harm.

Yet any move to outlaw protest must be contemplated very carefully by the community before proceeding. The explanatory statement tabled with Mr Rattenbury's draft bill acknowledges that the legislation would limit freedoms that Canberrans presently enjoy and which are protected by the ACT's Human Rights Act: the right to express one's views and to assemble peacefully in public places. Similarly, Mr Rattenbury's bill seeks to curtail Canberrans' rights to film or take photographs near the clinic, even though it is a bustling, public place.

In other countries, notably the United States, abortion clinics, their staff and their patients have been the target of not only protests but horrific attacks. Yet here in Canberra the protest that prompted Mr Rattenbury's bill involved a handful of people praying outside a clinic, rarely, if at all, interacting with passers-by. The decision of the Catholic Archbishop, Christopher Prowse, to lead one of these vigils may have ramped up the protesters' visibility. But whatever one thinks of their views and beliefs, it is too far a stretch to say the prayer group was harassing women. Mr Rattenbury himself, when describing the worst of the protesters' behaviour, said "sometimes they have included emotive placards and sometimes single-viewpoint pamphlets have been handed out". This is a ridiculously low bar for defining criminal conduct and for setting aside, at least in part, rights such as freedom of speech and assembly. Nor, insofar as the public is aware, has the vigil intruded on individual patients' privacy. Indeed, the area outside the clinic is a busy thoroughfare: there is no way of identifying who, among the many passers-by, is accessing family-planning services.

Nonetheless, the absence, at least to date, of more conspicuously offensive behaviour toward clinic patients is no guarantee it will never happen. What's unclear is whether Mr Rattenbury's bill is the right kind of safeguard. He says he is open to refining the legislation, which is only a draft, so as to minimise the limits it imposes of individual freedoms. Yet the problem may be more fundamental. Some academics say the two-year-old Tasmanian laws, if challenged, could be found to be constitutionally invalid – a breach of Australians' implied right of freedom of political communication. Of course, the abortion clinic exclusion zones might never be challenged legally. But if ACT Assembly does implement them, it should get the balance right on the first occasion, rather than come to regret a poorly thought-out solution to a loosely defined problem.