The city council in Clearwater, Florida, enacted an ordinance in 2023 that set an abortion clinic buffer zone of five feet to keep pro-life activists and sidewalk counselors away from pregnant women headed inside.
Don’t pro-choice folks want pregnant women to make informed choices about whether to end the life growing inside them, or is killing the baby the most important outcome?
Pro-lifers filed a lawsuit to stop enforcement of the ordinance in the name of free speech. A lower court upheld the buffer zone. But that wasn’t the end for people committed to saving the unborn and giving women in crisis what they need to protect their babies.
Lynda Bell, president of Florida Right to Life, announced a victory for pro-lifers. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the lower court’s ruling that upheld the ordinance. The panel issued a preliminary injunction to block it. From National Right to Life:
Framed by city officials as a measure for vehicle safety, the rule effectively created a “no-speech zone” that silenced the free speech voices of sidewalk advocates. Pro-lifers who have long used peaceful conversations to inform women about resources like adoption and options other than abortion, argued that this restriction violated their constitutional rights to free expression.
This smells like viewpoint discrimination, similar to what happened to a street preacher in Houston, Texas. Police arrested and detained him for “trespassing.”
“The judges rightly recognized that while public safety is important, it cannot be used as a pretext to suppress dissenting views on one of the most critical moral issues of our time: the sanctity of human life,” Bell wrote. “This echoes previous Supreme Court precedents, such as the 2014 McCullen v. Coakley, which invalidated a 35-foot buffer zone around Massachusetts abortion clinics for similar reasons.”
The fight for life will never be over. We must be the voices for the voiceless and strength for the vulnerable.
