Pro-life sidewalk counseling highlighted in potential high court cases, federal pardons

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- The Supreme Court is expected to decide soon whether to hear a pair of First Amendment cases seeking to strike down so-called "bubble zones" for pro-life demonstrators outside abortion clinics.

The cases have been heard in conference twice. If the court accepts the cases, a hearing is not expected until sometime next spring, and a decision not until next summer.

In Turco v. City of Englewood, New Jersey, and Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale, Illinois, lawyers for Jeryl Turco, a sidewalk counselor, and Coalition Life are asking the justices to overturn the court's 2000 decision in Hill v. Colorado, in which the court upheld a state law making it unlawful for any person within 100 feet of an abortion clinic entrance to "knowingly approach" within 8 feet of another person without that person's consent, in order to do sidewalk counseling.

The St. Louis-based nonprofit Coalition Life, which specializes in sidewalk counseling to direct women to pregnancy resource centers, has objected to a law, which has since been repealed, restricting protests outside three abortion clinics in Carbondale. It is represented by the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based public interest law firm. Turco is represented by the Washington-based American Center for Law & Justice.

In 2014, after complaints that clinic protests had turned violent, Englewood adopted a "bubble zone" ordinance making it illegal for protesters to "knowingly enter or remain on a public way or sidewalk adjacent to a health care facility or transitional facility within a radius of eight feet of any portion of an entrance, exit or driveway of such facility."

Carbondale adopted its ordinance in 2022, but its City Council repealed the buffer zone language just 18 months later. The zones there were also 8 feet, but focused on the distances between people, not from clinic entrances.

In December 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear a similar challenge by Debra Vitagliano, a Catholic woman, to an "abortion bubble" law passed in 2022 in Westchester County, New York. By the time the case was before the court, the county had repealed the law, saying it was difficult to enforce, so it was considered moot.

In the Carbondale suit, Thomas More Society lawyers argue that the 8-foot limit prevents Coalition Life counselors from making eye contact: "Coalition Life's sidewalk counselors attempt to talk to people outside of abortion facilities and offer information about alternatives to abortion. The counselors get as close as possible to people in order to make eye contact and speak from a normal conversational distance in a friendly and gentle manner."

In a related development, a federal judge in Michigan Nov. 18 gave the first indication of expected presidential pardons for about 50 people convicted of abortion clinic blockades during the past two years.

In a status conference on motions filed by lawyers for the Thomas More Society, the Chicago-based public interest law firm, U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Leitman put a temporary stay on post-trial motions until March 24, when the Justice Department should have new federal attorneys, in the administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

He was hearing the case of seven protesters, all evangelical Christians, who were convicted Aug. 20 of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, at clinics in Sterling Heights and Saginaw, Michigan. Leitman said he expected to hear whether "there has been any change in the government's position with respect to the continuation of this case."

Less is known about the status of possible individual or blanket pardons of Lauren Handy and others incarcerated for violating the FACE Act. Martin Cannon, the Thomas More Society lawyer representing Handy, would not comment on the case to OSV News.

Handy, who organized a clinic blockade in Washington in 2020, is serving the longest sentence of any of them at 57 months, and is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Florida. Others have received sentences of as little as six months, two years or probation.

In 2023, Trump promised to pardon Handy and four others involved in the blockade even before the sentences were handed down. At a Family Research Council event that September, he said he would appoint a task force "to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who's been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration, so that I can study the situation very quickly and sign their pardons or commutations on Day One."

Trump, in a June speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, mentioned Paulette Harlow, a participant in Handy's Washington blockade who is serving a two-year sentence. "Paulette is one of many peaceful pro-lifers who Joe Biden has rounded up, sometimes with SWAT teams, and thrown them in jail," Trump said.

In prosecution documents, Harlow, a Secular Franciscan, was charged with body-slamming the clinic director in Washington. The only time recently a FACE Act case involved a police SWAT team was for Matthew Connolly, a former Franciscan friar who was charged in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia for obstructing operations at a clinic in 2021 by locking himself in a restroom. A SWAT team broke through the door to forcibly remove him.

The Catholic Church opposes abortion because it holds that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death, but the church also makes clear that all advocacy for justice must use only moral means. St. John Paul II taught in his 1993 encyclical, "Veritatis Splendor," that a person cannot "intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order … even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general."