The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a case from a St. Louis-based group that would have challenged so-called “buffer areas” around abortion facilities, allowing such laws to continue around the country.
The anti-abortion group Coalition Life in 2023 sued the southern Illinois city of Carbondale to upend a measure prohibiting demonstrators and other groups from gathering within 100 feet of the entrance to any medical facility. City Council members cited a growing number of instances of “intimidation, threats and interference” from anti-abortion protesters near the city’s clinics.
Coalition Life contended the anti-buffer zone law violated freedom of speech and other constitutional rights.
The city has since repealed the ordinance. Before that, both a federal court and an appeals court upheld the legality of the Carbondale law, citing a more-than-two-decades-old ruling from Colorado that protected buffer zones.
The Supreme Court’s taking up the case could have upended that Colorado ruling, Hill v. Colorado. The decision to pass on the Carbondale lawsuit means similar laws around the country can remain in effect.
“We're dismayed by the decision of the Supreme Court that limits pro-life speech around the country,” said Coalition Life Executive Director Brian Westbrook. “There’s all these different cities who are enforcing this, and the lower courts cannot overrule many of these ordinances, because the Supreme Court has not spoken.”
In a dissent, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued he would have taken the case, arguing Hill contradicted decades of First Amendment principles established by the court.
Thomas called decisions upholding the Colorado law “absurd, long-discredited” and “erroneous.”
Abortion providers in Carbondale cheered the decision, saying demonstrators took part in scare tactics and misdirection to keep people from entering their clinics.
“Anti-abortion protestors impede on the rights of pregnant people every day,” said Andrea Gallegos, the executive administrator of the Alamo Women’s Clinic in Carbondale, in an email. “Our patients are making health care decisions and those are their decisions alone to make. Patients' privacy and right to accessing healthcare should not be impeded by strangers at clinic doorsteps shouting anti-abortion rhetoric.”
Jennifer Pepper, CEO of CHOICES, another Carbondale-based abortion provider, said that clinic workers had experienced increases in threats and harassment following the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Laws that protect safe access to reproductive health care facilities follow a long history of government efforts to ensure people can exercise their fundamental rights — like voting, getting an education, and practicing their faith — without outside interference,” she said in an email.
Southern Illinois has become a destination for many seeking an abortion as several states in the Midwest and South have restricted access to abortions or banned the procedure entirely.
Unlike many nearby states, Illinois sought to protect the right to the procedure. Alamo and CHOICES opened their Carbondale clinics shortly after the 2022 Supreme Court decision.
The increase in services in Carbondale was one reason Coalition Life wanted to fight the city’s buffer ordinance, said Westbrook.
“Because there's so much influx of clientele from around the country going there … we believe that we had an opportunity to have a greater impact across the pro-life movement by serving those clients,” he said.
