Supreme Court rejects challenges to protest-free zones at abortion clinics

WASHINGTON − The Supreme Court on Monday passed on the chance to get rid of protest-free zones at abortion clinics, frustrating activists who say they need to get close enough to patients to make eye contact.

The court declined to hear challenges to a law in southern Illinois and to a 2014 ordinance in Englewood, New Jersey, that created a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken the cases.

Anti-abortion groups, as well as a number of Republican attorneys general, wanted the justices to use the challenges to overturn a 2000 decision − Hill v. Colorado − that upheld protest restrictions around abortion clinics.

“The time has come for the Court to restore the constitutional rights that Hill eviscerated, and this case provides a perfect opportunity to do so,” Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general who has argued more than 100 Supreme Court cases and represented the anti-abortion group Coalition Life, wrote in a filing about the Illinois law.

In Hill v. Colorado, the court ruled 6-3 that Colorado could prevent activists from coming within 8 feet of another person within a 100-foot zone surrounding a health care facility.

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The justices kept that decision intact in 2014 when it struck down a 35-foot protest-free zone outside abortion clinics in Massachusetts.

But the court slammed the 2000 ruling when overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. Criticizing the effect of abortion cases on other areas of the law, Alito wrote that Hill “distorted First Amendment doctrines.”

In his dissent Monday, Thomas said Hill “has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty.”

Thomas also said he would have used the Illinois case to explicitly overrule Hill.

Anti-abortion groups had argued that, rather than heeding the courts’ previous warnings on Hill, some municipalities flouted it.

PreviouslyAnti-abortion groups want Supreme Court to get rid of protest-free zones at clinics

Protective zones for patients after Dobbs ruling

The Southern Illinois city of Carbondale saw an increase in anti-abortion protests after two reproductive health facilities opened to accommodate women from nearby states that restricted abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

City officials responded by passing restrictions modeled after Colorado’s. But the city council repealed the ordinance in July, before anyone had been charged with violating it.

The city’s lawyers told the Supreme Court they had determined existing laws provided sufficient protection from any “disorderly conduct.”

Ant-abortion groups’ assertion that the ordinance was repealed to avoid the Supreme Court getting involved is just speculation, Carbondale’s lawyers said. In any case, they added, the city is entitled to reconsider its position for any reason.

In New Jersey, an anti-abortion activist represented by the American Center for Law and Justice challenged a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities in Englewood.

The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the restrictions were narrowly tailored, do not violate protesters’ First Amendment rights, and are less restrictive than what the Supreme Court sanctioned in 2000.

But challengers will keep asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice told the court, until that 2000 decision has been overturned.