Ruling OKs Abortion Blockades : Protests: A federal judge dismissed a suit challenging Operation Rescue actions at family-planning clinics. ACLU attorneys plan to appeal.

A federal judge awarded a major victory to anti-abortion forces Wednesday in dismissing a lawsuit which asserted that Operation Rescue’s blockades at family-planning clinics violated the civil rights of women seeking to use the clinics’ services.

U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima denied claims by the National Abortion Federation and other pro-choice groups that Operation Rescue’s actions violated a woman’s right to travel and her right to obtain an abortion.

Tashima also vacated a preliminary injunction he issued March 15 barring blockades, thus freeing abortion opponents to reinstitute such actions without fear of legal consequences in federal court.

“It’s a great result for us,” Operation Rescue attorney Victor Smith said of the decision.

He said that, while Tashima’s decision “is not a world-changing decision, it will limit the tools of the opposition to interfere with the protests.”

Susan Finn, a spokeswoman for Operation Rescue’s Southern California organization based in Anaheim, said, “We’re encouraged that Judge Tashima feels that there are no grounds on a federal level to prevent Operaton Rescue from saving babies and women from the destruction of abortion.”

Finn said the organization’s next major blockade is scheduled Feb. 17, but said the location will not be revealed until a few days before the action.

American Civil Liberties Union attorney Carol Sobel, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said she will ask Tashima to stay his ruling today, while she appeals the decision in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

She stressed that Tashima’s decision was in conflict with a ruling by a federal appeals court in New York last September and decisions by federal judges in Oregon and Washington.

Wednesday’s ruling not a surprise. In September, Tashima had ruled that “abortion seekers” are not a special class of people entitled to protection under the Ku Klux Klan Act, a 19th-Century civil rights law that was the underpinning of the suit.

Tashima told the plaintiffs, including several family-planning clinics, that they could amend their complaint. But he expressed doubts about whether they could succeed.

ACLU attorneys filed new papers in the case. But in his decision Wednesday, Tashima said they had not met their burden of showing that pregnant women were entitled to protection under the 19th-Century law.

The judge also stated that health-care clinics were not a protected class under the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The statute was enacted during the Reconstruction era in the South and was designed to protect blacks from attacks by racists, but it has been applied to others.

Sobel said that if the ACLU’s appeal is spurned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, she will file a new suit in a California state court seeking to enjoin Operation Rescue blockades.

* ANTI-ABORTION DEBT

Operation Rescue shuts down its national office. B9