Liberal Forum

It will be harmful to women if the Supreme Court overturns the 2007 Massachusetts law requiring protesters outside abortion clinics to respect a 35-foot buffer zone. While abortion opponents have cast this as a free speech issue, it is not.

Fundamentally, this is a question of unfettered access to legal health care.

Anti-abortion protesters say their First Amendment-guaranteed right to free speech is being thwarted by a state law that keeps them outside a 35-foot perimeter at reproductive health facilities. The law was enacted in response to decades of harassment targeted at people seeking entry into women’s healthcare and abortion clinics and a 1994 shooting rampage that killed two people at a Brookline Planned Parenthood clinic.

A buffer zone likely would not have changed the outcome of that tragedy, but it has meant women could make their way into clinics relatively free from harassment. Eleanor McCullen, the lead plaintiff in the McCullen V. Coakley Supreme Court case, claims the buffer zone stops her from spreading her “message of love.”

The law gives abortion opponents the opportunity to have their say — just not within a rather small perimeter around the entrances to these facilities.

While McCullen, a 77-year-old grandmother, may not be an intimidating figure, the presence of anti-abortion protesters outside clinics can be frightening. The buffer zone law exists to ensure safe passage for women who enter reproductive health clinics. Nobody should be forced to run a gauntlet in order to undergo a valid, legal — and yes, constitutionally protected — medical procedure.

It has been widely documented that this is just what women were forced to do before the buffer zone law went into effect — when protesters sometimes attempted to block clinic entrances.

Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his questioning of lawyers during Wednesday’s oral arguments that those in the anti-abortion group are not protesters, but rather people who want to quietly counsel women. “It’s a counseling case; it’s not a protest case,” he said.

That argument is both patronizing and ludicrous.

The time for counseling is not when a woman is walking into a clinic. And the “counselors” shouldn’t be untrained, sign-toting strangers who claim they want to help by discussing a highly personal decision in public.

Does Scalia think a woman who has gotten to the point of walking into an abortion clinic has not already thought long and hard about her choices, evaluated her situation and considered her options?

Critics of the law also argue that it favors those who support abortion rights because it lets clinic workers within the buffer zone. The logic there is a stretch: how else will clinic workers get into their places of employment if not through the entrance?

That’s the simple reality about a place of employment and has nothing to do with favoring one side over the other.

The right to free speech guaranteed in the constitution is not absolute. States around the country have enacted laws creating similar protection zones for other groups of people: protesters must respect the space of mourners at funerals, keep a wide berth at political conventions, and leave space around other tension-filled or controversial sites like labor disputes and slaughterhouses, for example.

The law must respect the constitutional rights of all. The buffer zone is not shutting down free speech, simply marking out a territory — and not a very large one at that — to provide space for others to exercise their constitutionally protected right to undergo a health procedure of their choice.