Ok I’m reading the McCullen opinion, and already in the first sentence I have a problem. This is going to take years – it’s 52 pages.
In 2007, Massachusetts amended its Reproductive Health Care Facili
ties Act, which had been enacted in 2000 to address clashes between
abortion opponents and advocates of abortion rights outside clinics
where abortions were performed.
Um, no. That makes it sound like a matter of political theater, or debates that turned into clashes. The clashes were between abortion opponents and women attempting to enter the clinics where abortions were performed. The abortion opponents try to stop them.
There are escorts, who are there to try to protect such women from the protesters, but they wouldn’t be there if the protesters weren’t so intrusive and aggressive.
But more substantively…p 3:
The buffer zones serve the Commonwealth’s legitimate interests in maintaining public safety on streets and sidewalks and in preserving access to adjacent reproductive healthcare facilities. See Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N. Y., 519 U. S. 357, 376. At the same time, however, they impose serious burdens on petitioners’ speech, depriving them of their two primary methods of communicating with arriving patients: close, personal conversations and distribution of literature. Those forms of expression have historically been closely associated with the transmission of ideas. While the Act may allow petitioners to “protest” outside the buffer zones, petitioners are not protestors; they seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion, but to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women about various alternatives. It is thus no answer to say that petitioners can still be seen and heard by women within the buffer zones. If all that the women can see and hear are vociferous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively stifled petitioners’ message.
There’s an issue here. I guess it doesn’t arise that much because people don’t act like anti-abortion protesters much. It was an issue with the Hari Krishnas once upon a time, I think…
The issue is to do with our right to move around in public freely without other people deliberately blocking us, pestering us, harassing us, soliciting us, getting in our way. It’s similar to the issue I had with street harassment in Paris as a teenager.
Imagine if there were always a bunch of people on the sidewalk in front of your front door, hassling you whenever you arrived home. That would be hellish.
Apparently the First Amendment protects their “right” to do that.
I’m not convinced. Even leaving abortion aside – I’m not convinced. It’s this business of “they seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion, but to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women” – hey I don’t give a fuck what other people “seek” to do if doing it entails their getting all up in my face. The word “consensual” frankly doesn’t belong there, and borders on insulting. I’m not at all convinced that people in general have a constitutional right to try to insist that I “consent” to listen to them.
The law is a clumsy instrument to deal with harassment, but not dealing with harassment at all is a seriously bad idea.
I would like to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with President Obama about ending the NSA spying, drone attacks, and a few other things. Preventing me from getting within handshake distance of the President is stifling my free speech. Sure, he could hear me if I yelled epithets through a bullhorn from outside the White House grounds–but that’s not what I want to do. I want to look him in the eye and give him some loving counseling.
Surely the SCOTUS would overturn any laws that prevent me doing that, right?
If the women visiting these clinics wanted to have such a conversation, they could get one right outside the buffer zone. The fact that these women aren’t having these conversations there, even though they are clearly available to them, shows you that the conversations the anti-abortion people want to have aren’t consensual.
The good news is that the anti-choicers don’t have the right to harass or obstruct anyone, and this decision doesn’t change that. In fact, pages 23-26 of the opinion explicitly approve of several other restrictions on them. It also didn’t overrule Hill v. Colorado 530 U.S. 703 (2000) which upheld buffer zones around patients.
Dahlia Lithwick in Slate notes the buffer around the Supreme Court itself. Presumably, Antonin Scalia sees no need to protect the rights of well-meaning citizens to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with him.
When I blockquote a paragraph (and don’t another), it blockquotes just what I choose it to blockquote — neither more nor less.
But for everyone else, the first paragraph in #4 is from A Masked Avenger’s comment #1 and is supposed to be blockquoted, while the second is me and should not be.
In Portland OR there is a guy who drove around in a panel truck with huge blow-up color images of aborted fetuses on the sides. Oregon’s most liberal interpretation of the First Amendment protects him. Some of the people who supported his actions turned around and protested any inclusion of evolutionary biology in public school course material citing the fact that their rights to ‘protect’ their children from harmful ideas (i.e. ones that deviate from their religious dogma) are being violated. Yet they had no problem exposing the rest of our children to disturbing imagery in support of their political agenda.
For me the issue should be where does free speech end and coersion and intimidation begin. I don’t have the answer, but I’m pretty sure that hounding women outside of a healthcare facility falls well inside of the later category.
CBS News from Oct 16, 2011 (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cornel-west-arrested-at-supreme-court-protest/):
“Author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West has been arrested while protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court about corporate influence in politics.
A Supreme Court spokeswoman says 19 people were arrested Sunday afternoon after they refused to leave the grounds of the court.”
The problem is a missing right (as I’ve tried to point out at interminable length). We have a right to free speech, but that implies a corresponding right not to hear, a right to silence, and that hasn’t been articulated yet. (Assuming you don’t count me….)
A parallel situation is freedom of movement. It ends at the point where movement would result in assault or even touching. Your freedom of movement ends where my right to control my own space and movement begin.
But for speech, we haven’t figured that out yet, except at the level of feelings. You got no right to get up in my face. Exactly. Freedom of speech ends where my right to be free of harassment begins.
I don’t know what it’s going to take for that obvious right to become more than a privilege that applies only to Ye Prez and The Supremes.
[P]etitioners are not protestors; they seek … to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women about various alternatives.
Because nothing says “caring” and “consensual” quite like accosting strangers and discussing their medical history/decisions in public, on a sidewalk.
qwints @3:
As far as I know, all of those other restrictions were in place before this buffer zone law was in place. That’s kind of why they passed that law: the previous restrictions weren’t enough. If you talk to clinic escorts, the people who experience the effects of these laws most directly, you find they do think this gives anti-choice protesters the right to harass.
qwints @3:
It takes at least two people to have an abortion. Intimidate the doctors, nurses, or escorts into inaction, and you’ve banned abortion anyway.
@HJ, sorry I wrote that incorrectly. Hill v. Colorado protects everyone within 100 feet of a health facility. The person you link is wrong about what the law can’t forbid (e.g. the court held that it would be constitutional to criminalize “one of the protesters just screaming at me, just inches away from my face”), but is right in practice. Police simply don’t protect clinics from protesters in the way they protect politicians or banks regardless of what the law says. You only have to look at the record, where Massachusetts said protesters were criminally obstructing the streets and sidewalks but hadn’t prosecuted anyone for doing so in “at least 17 years.”
It’s still important that we don’t let anti-choicers spread the lie that they can harass women free from fear of criminal prosecution. Despite this decision, women still have some protections.
Ahh…. NO. Oh, it’s personal, all right, but there’s nothing caring about the harassers, and there’s nothing consensual about what they’re doing. Why the fuck should they have any kind of “right” to harass women who have already made up their minds?
qwints @11:
Well, yeah, because banks don’t have to deal with this crap:
I owe a hat-tip to Thibeault for tipping me off to that one. The video behind the link details a long, sordid history of anti-abortion violence, by a loose network of fanatics egging one another on. It’s well worth watching.
There’s three reasons for that. First, the law that predates the current one made it nearly impossible to prosecute anyone.
Secondly, you assume anti-choice people are dumb. They aren’t; they know exactly what the law says, because then they know exactly what they can get away with without being arrested.
I can’t find the link now, but I remember reading a story of two anti-choice protesters who would walk back and forth across the parking lot entrance of an abortion clinic. They would take five minutes to cross the three-metre space, all the while talking to one another. In the meantime their kids would swamp the waiting car, tossing posters and pamphlets on the windscreen and trying to engage the hapless occupants, while traffic piles up behind them. Maddow, in the video I linked to above, also mentions the anti-choicers document everything, including taking photos of who enters the clinic as well as the license plate of the car they arrived in.
Speaking of which, Maddow briefly shows a photo demarking the 35-foot buffer zone. See, in Massachusetts, they actually paint the zone boundary on the ground. This means that by bouncing between Google search and Google Satellite Maps, you can see for yourself just how “restrictive” these boundaries are.
Here’s the most draconian one I can find. Can you honestly believe that staying outside that line is an undue burden on speech, worth jeopardizing the safety of patients and staff?
If a patient is arriving with buffer escorts, there is nothing so very “consensual” about the “conversation” the birth-forcers want to have.
If I say “go away” “leave me alone” and “don’t talk to me,” does that take it out of the realm of “consensual”? Do they then have to leave me alone?