Setback for Abortion Foes : Can’t Block N.Y. Clinics, Court Rules

The Supreme Court refused today to let an anti-abortion group block the entrances to abortion clinics in New York. It was the second high court setback in two weeks for Operation Rescue.

The justices’ action was praised by abortion-rights advocates and denounced by Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry. The court left intact an order in which a federal judge permanently banned the group’s members from interfering with women entering New York-area abortion clinics.

Operation Rescue members are under similar injunctions in other cities.

“It’s a tremendous victory,” said Bill Baird, who runs two Long Island clinics where demonstrations have occurred repeatedly. “I’d like to see the courts go further and assign federal marshals to escort women in, just as they escorted blacks into buildings in the 1960s,” he said.

Terry, in a statement released from Operation Rescue’s office in Binghamton, N.Y., said, “No court can prohibit us from rescuing babies. These judges have joined the heritage of Nazi judges who sanctioned the murders of the innocent.”

The justices took today’s action--not a formal ruling but a denial of Operation Rescue’s appeal--without comment and without any recorded dissenting vote.

Just last week, the court voted 5-4 to leave intact a similar ban on Operation Rescue blockades at abortion clinics in Atlanta.

But today’s action was a bigger setback for Operation Rescue. The court’s order in the Atlanta case was preliminary in nature. The dispute had reached the justices as a request for emergency help before Georgia courts had finished studying the controversy.

The four justices who voted to allow demonstrations in Atlanta said free-speech restrictions should not have been imposed before the state courts had a chance to rule definitively.

The high court today rejected a formal appeal by Operation Rescue after lower courts ruled definitively against the group in the New York case.

The National Organization for Women and other abortion-rights advocates sued Operation Rescue and Terry in a New York state court in 1988.

“It’s a humdinger . . . couldn’t be better,” said NOW President Molly Yard. “They were breaking the law,” she said, adding that her organization is ready to seek court injunctions anywhere Operation Rescue members try to bar access to clinics.

The suit, seeking an end to the group’s blockades, alleged violations of several state laws and one federal law, the Ku Klux Klan Act.

Operation Rescue’s lawyers had the case transferred to federal court, where U.S. District Judge Robert J. Ward in early 1989 permanently enjoined the demonstrators.

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals last Sept. 20 upheld Ward’s injunction and became the nation’s first federal appeals court to rule that Operation Rescue’s tactics violate women’s civil rights and are not a type of protected free speech.

The appeals court said the Operation Rescue demonstrators had violated the Ku Klux Klan Act’s ban on conspiracies that violate the rights of a “class of persons.”