The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the 35-foot protest-free zone outside abortion clinics in Massachusetts Thursday, declaring it an unconstitutional restraint on the free-speech rights of protesters, according to Reuters.
Authorities have less intrusive ways to deal with potential confrontations or other problems that can arise outside clinics, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, Reuters reported. Roberts noted that most of the problems reported by police and the clinics in Massachusetts occurred outside a single Planned Parenthood facility in Boston, and only on Saturdays when the largest crowds typically gather.
"For a problem shown to arise only once a week in one city at one clinic, creating 35-foot buffer zones at every clinic across the Commonwealth is hardly a narrowly tailored solution," Roberts said, according to Reuters.
Roberts noted that no other state has a similar law and that he is aware of only five cities that have created fixed buffer zones around abortion clinics: Burlington, Vermont; Pittsburgh; Portland, Maine, and San Francisco and Santa Barbara in California, according to Reuters.
The ruling also left intact a high court decision from 2000 that upheld a floating buffer zone in Colorado, Reuters reported.
While the court was unanimous in the overall outcome, Roberts joined with the four liberal justices to strike down the buffer zone on narrower grounds than the other, more conservative justices wanted, according to Reuters.
Abortion rights advocates lamented the new ruling and said it compromised the safety of women seeking abortions, Reuters reported.
"This decision shows a troubling level of disregard for American women, who should be able to make carefully considered, private medical decisions without running a gantlet of harassing and threatening protesters," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, according to Reuters.
Nearing the end of its 2013-14 term, the court decided another potentially significant case Thursday, ruling that temporary, recess appointments made by President Barack Obama to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 were illegal because the Senate was not, in fact, in recess when Obama acted, Reuters reported. In that case as well, the court was unanimous about the outcome but divided over the reasoning.
The justices will meet one last time on Monday to hand down decisions in cases involving the Obama health law requirement that employers cover women's contraception in their employee health plans and the ability of unions representing government employees to collect fees from workers who don't wish to join the union, according to Reuters.
