It’s appropriate during Sanctity of Life Month that the United States Supreme Court

heard a case challenging a law protecting buffer zones around abortion clinics.

What’s being addressed in McCullen vs. Coakley is Massachusetts’ law, passed in

2007, which says that only employees and patients can stand within a 35-foot radius

of a “reproductive health care facility,” i.e. abortion clinic. Legal experts inside

the court during oral arguments report that justices seem likely to overturn the

Massachusetts law partially due to the sheer size of the buffer zone, and because the

law applies only to abortion clinics, thus targeting a specific kind of speech.

Seventy-six-year-old Eleanor McCullen is challenging the law because she wants

to stand outside clinics and attempt to speak with women going in for abortions,

hoping to change their minds. Peaceful pro-life demonstrators also want the law

overturned. The free speech argument is that those who express their disagreement

with abortion, or seek to persuade women against it, are kept out of the area while

those who perform abortions, or are sympathetic to abortions are allowed in.

The law carries with it a $500 fine for a first offense and fines up to $5000 plus

two and a half years in jail for subsequent offenses. It’s based upon Colorado’s law,

which the Supreme Court upheld in 2000, and which involves a “no approach zone”

of 8 feet around any person within 100 feet of an abortion clinic. This is a sort of

floating buffer zone, or bubble zone that makes it illegal for anyone to get closer than

8 feet from a person in the area without that person’s consent. So, no handing out of

leaflets, no quiet conversations or counseling.

If the court strikes down the Massachusetts law, some are wondering what it will do

with Hill vs. Colorado. Will justices leave Colorado’s bubble zone law intact, strike it

down or possibly narrow it?

Since the Hill decision, four of the six Supreme Court justices in the majority have

retired. The three who dissented, Justices Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas, are still

on the court. In recent years, the court is showing itself to be more sympathetic to

First Amendment rights. In his dissent in the Hill case, Justice Kennedy wrote that

the majority opinion, “contradicts more than half-a century of well-established first

amendment principles”.

Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, says, “it’s plainly

discriminatory for the government to say that abortion supporters can speak freely

at a given place, and pro-lifers cannot,” But it’s somehow perversely consistent.

Father Pavone adds, “Then again, bubble zone laws and abortion are based on the

same illicit notion, namely that some people have rights and some people don’t.”

We’re not talking about allowing people to intimidate or harass women outside

abortion clinics. There are other laws against that. This law should be overturned

because it limits and criminalizes peaceful speech.