Supreme Court backs restrictions on anti-abortion protests
The Associated Press
06.28.00
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| Al Garcia, an anti-abortion protester, shouts at motorist as she arrives at Planned Parenthood Clinic in Denver yesterday. |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court gave states greater leeway to restrict anti-abortion demonstrations outside health clinics, ruling today that Colorado's limits on "sidewalk counseling" legitimately protect patients' right to avoid unwanted speech.
The justices, by a 6-3 vote in Hill v. Colorado, upheld a 1993 Colorado "bubble" law that bars people from counseling, distributing leaflets or displaying signs within 8 feet of others without their consent whenever they are within 100 feet of a health-clinic entrance.
"This statute simply empowers private citizens entering a health care facility with the ability to prevent a speaker, who is within 8 feet and advancing, from communicating a message they do not wish to hear," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court.
Violators can get up to six months in jail and a $750 fine.
The law had been challenged as a violation of protesters' free-speech rights.
"The right to free speech, of course, includes the right to attempt to persuade others to change their views, and may not be curtailed simply because the speaker's message may be offensive to his audience," Stevens wrote. "But the protection afforded to offensive messages does not always embrace offensive speech that is so intrusive that the unwilling audience cannot avoid it."
His opinion was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Dissenting were Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Scalia and Kennedy both read from their dissents from the bench.
Scalia called the ruling "one of many aggressively pro-abortion novelties announced by the court in recent years."
"Today's decision is an unprecedented departure from this court's teachings respecting unpopular speech in public" areas, Kennedy's dissenting opinion said.
The decision marked the first time the nation's highest court reviewed a state legislature's attempt to regulate anti-abortion demonstrators outside health clinics. The justices twice previously had ruled in abortion-protest disputes but those had stemmed from court injunctions aimed at specific clinics, not laws with statewide effect.
In 1994, the court in Madsen v. Women's Health Center upheld a 36-foot demonstration-free zone around a Florida clinic's entrances but struck down provisions for a larger buffer zone. And the justices in their 1997 decision Schenck v. ProChoice Network of Western New York upheld a court-ordered 15-foot buffer zone around New York clinic entrances but struck down a judge's call for a "floating buffer zone" requiring protesters to stay at least 15 feet away from people as they entered or left the clinics.
Stevens said the Colorado law "is not a regulation of speech. Rather, it is a regulation of the places where some speech may occur."
"The 8-foot restriction on an unwanted physical approach leaves ample room to communicate a message through speech," Stevens added. Demonstrators can stand on the sidewalk at clinic entrances and hand leaflets to those entering the clinic as they pass by.
The Colorado law was enacted, state officials had told the court, after abortion patients complained of being spat on, kicked and harassed outside clinics. About 10,000 women seek abortions in Colorado each year.
But the three anti-abortion demonstrators who challenged the state law called their tactics gentle and compassionate, and said they raised their voices only because they were required to keep their distance from those they sought to advise.
When the case was argued before the justices in January, one of the three Colorado challengers, Leila Jeanne Hill, stood outside the Supreme Court building with a postcard displaying a smiley face. "I think we're going to have our First Amendment rights back this summer," the signs read.
The Colorado law was challenged by Hill, Audrey Himmelmann and Everitt Simpson Jr., who lost in lower courts.
Their Supreme Court appeal was supported by several liberal groups — the American Civil Liberties Union and the AFL-CIO among others — worried that Colorado's law could be used to censor speech in various circumstances, such as striking nurses who picket for better pay outside health clinics or patients-rights groups that demonstrate for more affordable health care.