Abortion Protest Ruling Overturned

A week after ruling that antiabortion activists have a free-speech right to confront patients on the sidewalk, the Supreme Court on Monday overturned a U.S. appeals court decision that upheld restrictions against such protesters in Arizona and, in the process, cast doubt on ordinances in California cities that limit picketing near health care facilities.

In a one-line order, the justices told the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, to reconsider the constitutionality of a Phoenix ordinance that restricts large protests within 100 feet of medical facilities.

The law, enacted in 1993, also requires all antiabortion activists to step back eight feet from any person who asks them to do so.

The appeals court upheld this so-called “bubble ordinance” in 1995, but the justices vacated that decision Monday and sent it back for further consideration in light of its decision last week in the similar case.

In a brief on behalf of 34 California cities, lawyers for San Francisco and Santa Barbara said that their cities have similar laws and that they had urged that the Phoenix law be upheld.

Meanwhile, the high court dealt another setback to the advocates of term limits for members of Congress.

Last year, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down a voter initiative that sought either to force its federal lawmakers to support term limits or carry a ballot notation telling voters of their disagreement with it. The state judges said the initiative was “coercive” of lawmakers and violated the constitutional provision that requires amendments to begin either in Congress or in state legislatures, not through popular vote.

The justices refused to hear two appeals of that decision. The same issue is percolating in several other state courts, and the justices may reconsider the matter later.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the term limits movement by ruling 5 to 4 that states cannot impose such restrictions on federal lawmakers. Many states, including California, have adopted term limits for their state legislators, a matter generally outside the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction.

On the abortion issue, the Phoenix case has been closely watched as a test case in the West involving the power of cities to shield medical facilities from persistent demonstrators.

The Phoenix City Council passed its ordinance in 1993 as a response to protests outside clinics where abortions are performed. Women going to these clinics are a “captive audience” who are being subjected to “harassing and intimidating activity,” the ordinance said.

Its key provision made it illegal for a demonstrator near a health facility “to fail to withdraw upon a clearly communicated request to do so to a distance of at least eight feet away from any person” who makes such a request.

Lawyers for the American Center for Law and Justice, the legal firm funded by televangelist Pat Robertson, challenged the law on free-speech grounds.

Upholding the law, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Phoenix ordinance did not substantially limit free speech by the abortion opponents.

Lawyers for the protesters appealed to the Supreme Court last March, and it held the case until deciding a similar dispute from upstate New York. Last week, the Supreme Court upheld a judge’s order imposing a 15-foot, no-protest zone at the entrance of a clinic to “secure physical access” to the medical facility. But in Schenck vs. the Pro-Choice Network, the justices last week struck down the other restrictions on sidewalk demonstrators and said that a “floating buffer zone” around the approaching patients was unconstitutional.

Monday’s order granted the protesters’ appeal in the case of Sabelko vs. Phoenix. The justices took the same action in response to a Colorado law that restricted abortion protests throughout the state.

“These were dominoes that had to fall,” said Walter Weber, an attorney for the legal center that appealed on the protesters’ behalf.