Last June 26, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Massachusetts bubble zone law requiring sidewalk counselors to stand at least 35 feet away from the entrance of any abortion facility in McCullen v. Coakley. The city of Burlington, Vermont, rescinded its 35-foot city ordinance the next week. The abortion industry has tried to come up with new laws to silence pro-life sidewalk counselors ever since.
There's just one problem: There's no evidence that the laws “protect” anything except abortion facilities' profits. Thus, pro-abortion activists are trying desperately to gin up something, anything, to keep pro-life people away from their clients. The Vermont-based newspaper Seven Days reports:
Planned Parenthood has also been collecting evidence attempting to show that, without the protection of a buffer, patients have been intimidated and harassed. According to its medical director, Donna Burkett, some patients come in with elevated blood pressure and other physical symptoms brought on by the stress.
Because pregnant women never have high blood pressure on their own! Actually, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, “High blood pressure problems occur in 6 percent to 8 percent of all pregnancies in the U.S., about 70 percent of which are first-time pregnancies. In 1998, more than 146,320 cases of preeclampsia alone were diagnosed.”
Perhaps recognizing this claim's innate fragility, they have outlined a few instances of outrageous pro-life behavior. Here's how Jill Krowinski of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England described the alleged harassment of the vicious rosary-bearers:
On July 30, “There were four protesters today chatting with each other and praying out loud. They had signs they held and large signs on their cars. One woman entering the health center complained about the protesters, saying that they are so loud, they make people not want to come here.”
Of course, that “one woman” could have been the director or an employee.
Another outrage took place on July 19, when “[t]here were up to 10 protesters (including a baby) picketing and praying loudly. They were parked right outside the clinic with signs on their cars.” They parked right outside the facility? On a public street? The nerve.
Is that really the best you can muster? People praying and displaying signs?
Well, Planned Parenthood Volunteer Coordinator Paige Feeser said, “I had one protester come right up to my face and hand me a flyer showing how Susan B. Anthony would not approve of the decision of women getting abortions.”
“I would definitely say the Susan B. Anthony [incident] was one of the hardest things I had to witness,” she added.
The action she detests – the distribution of literature and handbills – is the most fundamental action the Bill of Rights was written to protect.
It's almost as if the First Amendment itself offends the abortion industry, that they see uttering anything other than the Planned Parenthood party line as a direct threat.
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The Supreme Court cited the lack of any actual threat in its ruling striking down the Massachusetts law. Captain William B. Evans of the Boston Police Department, the justices wrote, “testified that his officers had made 'no more than five or so arrests' at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston” under a 2000 law establishing a bubble zone, “and that what few prosecutions had been brought were unsuccessful.” The state could “identify not a single prosecution brought under those laws within at least the last 17 years.”
The justices ruled unanimously that sidewalk counselors only engage in “personal, caring, consensual conversations” with pregnant women.
That has not prevented the abortion industry and its media myrmidons from castigating people engaged in peaceful prayer outside abortionists' offices as the embodiment of all evil. In February, Cosmopolitan magazine published an article entitled, “6 Women on Their Terrifying, Infuriating Encounters With Abortion Clinic Protesters” that provided no evidence for any of the stories contained in it.
The Huffington Post likewise repeated Mississippi abortion escort Michelle Colon's claims that pro-lifers are “racist,” although her testimony did not bear out such a conclusion.
Then there is the never-ending campaign to demonize crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) as horrid profit centers that lie to women, although one such “exposé” cited zero falsehoods.
The abortion industry, and the Left generally, knows only one method to respond to any other viewpoint: legal suppression. And apparently no argument is too ridiculous to bolster that effort.
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