WHITE PLAINS, New York (LifeSiteNews) — A New York county violated the free speech rights of peaceful pro-life advocates in its enforcement of a draconian “bubble zone” law around abortion facilities, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled.
Westchester County’s Chapter 425, the “Reproductive Health Care Facilities Access Act,” establishes a buffer zone around abortion facilities and provides criminal penalties for pro-lifers who “knowingly” cross the boundary with the intention of discouraging abortion by protesting, counseling, or educating people going into abortion facilities. Violators can be charged with a misdemeanor and hit with a fine or punished with jail time, including up to a year in jail for repeat offenders.
Various pro-life organizations and pro-freedom law firms sued over the burden the law places on sidewalk counselors’ efforts to offer abortion-minded women information about alternatives or even just pray outside abortion mills. In August 2023, the Westchester Board of Legislators voted to repeal the law’s 8-foot “floating bubble zone” around individuals entering or leaving abortion facilities, but several other anti-speech provisions remain. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to the law in 2023.
In its August 12 order, the court ruled that “Plaintiffs are entitled to judgment in their favor that the 2022 version of Section 425.31(h) violated their constitutional rights,” specifically their “First Amendment rights to free speech and Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process.”
“Nobody should be sent to jail and forced to pay significant fines simply for handing out pro-life leaflets and talking peacefully to women about abortion alternatives on public sidewalks,” responded Michael McHale, senior counsel at Thomas More Society. “Yet, Westchester County’s vague ban on so-called ‘interference’ with abortion access threatened to do exactly that, in blatant violation of the First Amendment, as the Court recognized.”
“This decision sets a precedent that rogue governments may not recklessly trample on the fundamental rights of peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors and then attempt to run and hide at the first sign of an adverse court judgment—a common tactic wielded against pro-lifers,” McHale continued. “We look forward to pursuing significant attorney fees against Westchester County for violating our clients’ rights and in continuing to eradicate similarly unconstitutional restrictions on pro-life speech in courts across the country.”
Thomas More is also proceeding with an appeal challenging another provision of the law that had been previously upheld, its ban on “following-and-harassing,” defined as ignoring an “implied request to cease” on a public sidewalk, which the law firm contends is too ambiguous a definition.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld bubble zone laws in 2000’s Hill v. Colorado. The only member of the Court involved in the Hill case and still serving is conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented.
In 2021, the Supreme Court gave bubble zone laws another reprieve when it refused to hear Bruni v. City of Pittsburgh, which concerned a 2005 ordinance requiring pro-life activists to stay more than 15 feet away from the entrances to abortion facilities, effectively keeping pro-lifers from communicating with women entering or exiting the building to appeal to them to choose life or offer them assistance with abortion alternatives.
Earlier this year, the nation’s highest court also refused to take up the case of a similar law in Illinois, from which Thomas again dissented.
