Where Free Speech Collides With Abortion Rights

By ADAM LIPTAK, NYT, JAN. 12, 2014

BOSTON — A couple of mornings a week, Eleanor McCullen stakes out a spot outside the Planned Parenthood clinic here and tries to persuade women on their way in to think twice before having an abortion.

But she has to watch her step. If she crosses a painted yellow semicircle outside the clinic’s entrance, she commits a crime under a 2007 Massachusetts law.

Early last Wednesday, bundled up against the 7-degree cold, Ms. McCullen said she found the line to be intimidating, frustrating and a violation of her First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in her challenge to the law.

The state’s attorney general, Martha Coakley, who is the lead defendant in the suit, said the 35-foot buffer zone created by the 2007 law was a necessary response to an ugly history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.

“This law is access balanced with speech balanced with public safety,” Ms. Coakley said. “It has worked extremely well.”

By law, Ms. McCullen must stay beyond a buffer zone outside the clinic’s entrance, which she says violates her right to free speech.

She added that there was every reason to think the law was constitutional in light of a 2000 decision from the Supreme Court upholding a similar Colorado law. “Nothing has changed except the court,” Ms. Coakley said.

The court’s membership has indeed changed since the 2000 decision, Hill v. Colorado, with the court growing more receptive to some free-speech claims and some restrictions on the right to abortion.

(More here.)