Pro-Life Group Appeals Asks SCOTUS to Ban Buffer Zones Around Abortion Clinic

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – A group of pro-life sidewalk counselors has filed suit asking the US Supreme Court to review and reverse a ruling it made in 2000 which allows abortion clinics to implement buffer zones preventing pro-life activists from operating within 100 feet of the facilities, the Christian Post (CP) reports.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, July 16 by the conservative Thomas More Society on behalf of the Coalition Life group of sidewalk counselors in Illinois, CP reports.

The brief complains that Coalition Life counselors are prevented from their constitutional right to approach women within feet of entering an abortion to inform them of the different options they have.

Although the legality of the buffer zones was settled in the 2000 Supreme Court case of Hill v Colorado, the Coalition Life group asserts that this decision was wrong as it violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and religious expression.

Moreover, the plaintiffs have noted, Hill was decided by a majority panel that included liberal justices who are no longer on the bench, CP reports.

The Coalition Life group notes that the current Supreme Court – made up of a 6-3 conservative supermajority – revoked the federal right to abortion in the 2022 case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Dobbs, the conservative justices reversed the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v Wade ruling which had granted a federal right to abortion up to viability. The plaintiffs in the Coalition Life case believe that if the current Supreme Court could reverse Roe v Wade perhaps it would do the same for Hill.

“Hill was egregiously wrong the day it was decided, and virtually all of its reasoning has been explicitly repudiated in subsequent decisions that faithfully applied bedrock First Amendment doctrine, leaving no one with any credible (let alone legally viable) claim to reliance on the departure from settled precedent that it marked,” the brief states.

“The whole point of Dobbs was to return debate about the sensitive questions surrounding abortion to the people,” the brief says.

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