Degrees of separation
It's Saturday morning outside the Planned Parenthood clinic on Commonwealth Avenue.
Seven elderly men and women stand in a line on the sidewalk, holding rosary beads, singing hymns. A dozen college students in blue T-shirts kneel in a circle on the pavement, praying quietly.
Ruth Schiavone -- tall, brown-haired, sunglasses over her eyeglasses -- is in her usual spot, about 6 feet from the entrance.
"We don't get rid of our children," she is saying to the grave-looking women passing her every few minutes.
And, "If you can't love your baby, dear, you can't love anyone!"
Schiavone, who has tried to prevent women from walking through the clinic's doors for 15 years, knows her campaign may soon get more challenging.
Right now, the abortion clinic buffer zone law allows Schiavone and other protesters to get within 6 feet of people entering the Boston clinic. But in an astoundingly loopy provision, there is no space restriction if women give their consent to closer contact. Planned Parenthood says it's almost impossible to define consent, and that protesters routinely come closer, whether patients agree or not.
A bill moving through the State House would prevent abortion opponents from coming within 35 feet of the clinic's entrance, period.
Schiavone doesn't like it.
"We're going to have to raise our voices, and that's not our style, because it's a private matter," she says.
Style appears to be a fluid concept, because minutes later, Schiavone is yelling outside the closed clinic doors: "You know, just because abortion is legal doesn't make it right! Slavery was legal, too! In Germany, the Holocaust was legal!"
Schiavone sees the buffer zone proposal as a free speech issue.
She is partly right: People who believe abortion is wrong should be able to make their views heard. If I agreed with Schiavone, I might be holding forth on the sidewalk, too. (As it is, I'd rather set up a booth distributing condoms and birth control pills.)
As decades of battles between sides that won't budge have made clear, abortion is not a simple issue. Reasonable people can disagree on when human life begins.
But there are reasonable people, and then there are nutsos .
This morning, the latter camp is most ably represented by two women known to staffers as Gay and Cheryl, who are standing at the back entrance of the clinic.
I'm not sure which is which, because they won't talk. One of them is tall, has a video camera, and wears a T-shirt from the TV show " C.O.P.S. " The other is short, with long brown hair and a T-shirt that reads "Maine Lighthouses."
Their caps say SECURITY. Clinic staffers say they also sometimes don Boston police vests, making them look even more official.
Lighthouses is right up against a car waiting to get into the garage, yelling, "Don't kill your baby, honey," at a young woman in the back. The woman in the car is launching enough f-bombs to make it clear that she did not consent to a conversation. But Lighthouses continues, trying to shove a graphic picture of an aborted fetus through the crack in an open window.
"That's what it looks like!" she shouts. "If it's just a lot of tissue, why can't you look at it?"
This is the problem with the current law: It doesn't just allow the praying students to make their views known. It allows Gay and Cheryl to get within inches of women seeking abortions, too.
Exploiting the squishiness of that law, any protester can make this "buffer" zone meaningless, crossing the line between free speech and intimidation.
Under the proposed change, protesters would still be able to yell at patients and trail clinic workers into the nearby supermarket at lunch. Schiavone would still be able to dog women for a block before they reach the clinic entrance. Gay would still be able to videotape nurses' license plates and find out where they live.
That's more than enough free speech right there.
Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com. 
