While New Hampshire abortion providers are deciding whether to put our state’s currently-unenforced anti-First-Amendment “buffer zone” law to work, they might want to keep an eye on the Bruni case out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A challenge by peaceful pro-lifers to that city’s buffer zone law had been tossed by a federal district court – but on June 1, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the lawsuit reinstated. The McCullen U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a Massachusetts buffer zone law figured into the Third Circuit’s order: “We reverse so that the Plaintiffs’ claims may be aired and assessed by the standard that McCullen now requires.”
“The government cannot muzzle speech just because pro-abortion politicians and special interests demand it,” said Matt Bowman of Alliance Defending Freedom, attorney for the Bruni plaintiffs.
Here in the Granite State, a buffer zone challenge (Reddy v. Foster) was dismissed recently because no abortion facility has yet posted a zone. Perhaps abortion facility operators know perfectly well about the standard required by McCullen, and they want to avoid the embarrassment of seeing it applied here.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote in McCullen:
Although respondents claim that Massachusetts ‘tried other laws already on the books’, they identify not a single prosecution brought under those laws within at least the last 17 years. And while they also claim that the Commonwealth ‘tried injunctions’, the last injunctions they cite date to the 1990s. In short, the Commonwealth has not shown that it seriously undertook to address the problem with less intrusive tools readily available to it. Nor has it shown that it considered different methods that other jurisdictions have found effective. [Emphasis added]
Sounds familiar. No wonder New Hampshire abortion providers have been in no hurry to test their pet law.
“The problem” referenced by Justice Roberts was the presence of a Massachusetts grandmother standing peacefully outside an abortion facility to offer information on alternatives to abortion. If “the problem” had been violence against abortion-minded women, protection wouldn’t have come from buffering the First Amendment.
