Today, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review cases from two U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals upholding protective buffer and bubble zones around abortion facilities, one in Chicago and the other in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Buffer zones are limited, fixed areas surrounding the entrance of a building designed to protect patients and facility employees from harassment, obstruction, and potential violence. Bubble zones are floating 8-foot personal safety zones; within the vicinity of a reproductive health facility, no one may knowingly approach within 8 feet of another without that person’s consent for specific activities such as counseling or advocacy or leafletting.
“The well-funded anti-abortion lobby has made a hobby out of challenging buffer zones all over the country against the backdrop of a startling rise in anti-abortion violence and harassment,” says WLP attorney Susan J. Frietsche, who represented witnesses and authored an amicus curiae brief in support of the City of Harrisburg when the case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Today’s decision leaves in place Chicago’s 8-foot floating bubble zone and Harrisburg’s 20-foot fixed buffer zone. Still pending before the Supreme Court is a cert petition challenging Pittsburgh’s 15-foot fixed buffer zone, (meaning a request has been made for the Supreme Court to hear it).
“The anti-abortion lobby, led by white men, has always targeted Black women and women of color,” says WLP staff attorney Christine Castro. “It’s just becoming more explicit. The endless legal maneuvering to let street protesters move physically closer to patients in need of affordable reproductive healthcare is just another example of that grotesque dynamic.”
The City of Harrisburg passed their buffer zone ordinance in 2012 after a long record of anti-abortion harassment outside healthcare facilities providing abortion care.
Since then, anti-abortion harassment and violence have gotten even worse.
Nationally, between 1977 and 2018, there were 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 188 arsons, 100 attempted bombings or arsons, and four acts of kidnapping committed against abortion providers, according to the National Abortion Federation. In 2017, threats of violence or death almost doubled at clinics from the year before.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
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