FINALLY, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.

Finally, says 1 Peter, all of you. There's no room for manoeuvre in that "all of you". Yet the anti-abortion protestors picketing the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital every day of Lent seem to think they are exempt.

Compassion is for others, not for all of them.

For around six years now, for the 40 day run up to Easter Sunday, a group of activists stand near the entrance to the maternity unit with their banners. "Pray To End Abortion", one reads.

"Does Anyone Care?" another asks. One quotes Jeramiah 1:5 - "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you".

They might argue their sympathy and love is for the unborn child but what of the women they harass and intimidate with their presence? Have they no care of them?

The group, 40 Days For Life, is an offshoot of an American campaign to dissuade women from undergoing an abortion. We should be firmly resisting any attempt to introduce American-style fundamentalist attitudes to abortion in this country.

Attacks on women and healthcare from the religious right in the US are horrifying: last year saw the rights and freedoms of American women to their own bodies under sustained targeting. Mississippi, where only one abortion clinic remains, has asked the Supreme Court to end constitutional protection for the procedure.

Texas has banned abortions after six weeks, effectively ending most procedures for the first time since the pivotal Roe v. Wade legislation was introduced in 1973. Other Republican states are following swiftly. This is not the sort of political influence we want seeping in to Scotland, an influence that seeks to remove the rights of women to have autonomy over their own bodies.

Driving past the Queen Elizabeth the other day and seeing one of these protests, I felt almost sorry for them. Almost. Four bedraggled protestors, two men and two women, standing silently with their pointless signs.

But I'm in a privileged position, being able to feel any pathos. I'm not a woman trying to access basic healthcare and being faced with intimidation attempts disguised as care.

Do these people not realise that for some women, a child is desperately wanted yet an abortion necessary for their health? Some women will have become pregnant through rape or have faced other trauma.

Even for the women doing the right thing, confident in their choice, it is grim to have to run the gauntlet of this judgement.

For several years now, there has been a push to introduce protest-free buffer zones outside all Scottish clinics providing abortion services but the Scottish Government has dragged its heels on the introduction of buffer zones, kicking the issue along the road and making it the .

In its 2021 manifesto and Women's Health Strategy, the SNP made commitments to introduce buffer zones but instead passed the issue on.

It has committed to introducing by-laws for local authorities and Green MSP Gillian Mackay is taking this forward in a planned Members' Bill but COSLA, the body acting for local authorities, wants the issue to be addressed at a national level.

Would these protests be acceptable in any other scenario, where people were quietly going about their legal business? Would we, now, tolerate anti-gay protests outside a registry office? Would we turn a blind eye to anti-trans protests outside the GIDS service at the Sandyford clinic?

Anti-immigration protests outside multi-cultural resource centres? Absolutely not, they would be vilified. And yet there is largely silence around this targetting of women.

Of course, there are rights to balance here. The right to protest is valid and must be protected. Religious expression is valid and must also be protected.

Buffer zones permit this - they allow for protest and they allow for freedom of expression but away from where the exercising of the right to protest might cause immediate harm.

Women in the UK have had the right to make their own reproductive decisions for 50 years now.

They should be able to make that choice in peace and with compassionate support yet will now have to wait another year, at least, for the protections to allow them to do so. It's not good enough.

Meanwhile, religious protestors would be the first to echo Jesus's words, "Love one another". That they can't include women in that edict is hypocrisy of the worst order.