Judges Side with Pro-Life Activists in Ruling on Protesting Abortion Clinics
In an unusual and heartening move, a federal appeals court has reversed its own previous ruling, which had allowed New York’s attorney general to block pro-life activists from trying to prevent women from obtaining abortions outside a Queens clinic.
In a 2-1 vote on Friday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan restored a ruling from a 2018 trial court that had denied an injunction to New York to put a stop to what was portrayed by the state as harassment on the part of the pro-life activists, Reuters reported.
It was only on Mar. 10 that the same panel voted 2-1 against the activist’s claims that being prevented from interacting with abortion-seeking women outside the Choices Women’s Medical Center in the neighborhood Jamaica in Queens, was a violation of their First Amendment rights.
New York Attorney General Letitia James praised the ruling at the time, according to the New York Law Journal.
“Every woman has the constitutional right to access an abortion and this order makes clear that everyone must be granted access to these facilities without obstruction and harassment,” she said. “The court has given us another opportunity to make our case and we will not waver in our fight to protect women’s reproductive freedoms.”
The state’s original case against the protesters, brought by then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (remember him?) accused the protesters of trying to crowd women entering the clinic and issuing death threats to clinic escorts, as well as holding “posters purportedly of aborted fetuses,” according to Reuters.
We’re expected to believe the activists had fake pictures of aborted fetuses in their cruel plot to control women’s bodies, apparently, and that the protesters were most certainly not holding pictures portraying the cruel, harsh reality that abortion cruelly and violently ends the life of an unborn child.
According to The Blaze, however, “The tactics used by the pro-life protesters involved speaking to abortion-seekers despite their being asked to be left alone, ‘slow-walking’ in front of patients, and leaning into cars to distribute campaign literature.”
Interestingly, in the March ruling, Judge Rosemary Pooler even characterized the pro-lifer’s behavior as “innocuous” — causing one to wonder how well-founded the claims of issued death threats, which would be completely contrary to the pro-life stance, really were.
All the same, she nonetheless bizarrely suggested that the protesters’ activities still needed to be prohibited because they might exacerbate the “health risks” already faced by abortion-seeking women, as reported by the New York Law Journal at the time.
“Even if such conduct is innocuous in other situations,” the judge said, “given the health risks women needing reproductive care face because of the increased stress, anxiety and agitation from protester misconduct, the negative effects of de minimis conduct are amplified when dealing with reproductive health.”
While we’re typically led to believe by proponents of abortion that abortion is perfectly safe as long as it is fully legal (something which reality has shown us can be very far from the truth), the Clinton-appointed judge obviously completely neglected to consider the health of the unborn child that pro-life activists would be seeking to save when attempting to dissuade its mother from ending its life.
The terms “reproductive care” and “reproductive health” are blatantly misused by pro-aborts. Abortion is not “care,” nor is it “health,” and it invariably threatens the physical, mental and emotional health of mothers, on top of ending the life of their unborn baby.
Friday’s ruling in favor of the pro-life protesters was hailed by their attorney as the constitutional victory that it truly is.
“We are pleased that the fundamental First Amendment rights of our clients have been restored, and look forward to returning to the district court and finishing the case once and for all,” said lawyer Stephen Crampton, who called the ruling “extraordinary.” He also noted the appeals court rarely reconsiders its own previous rulings.
Meanwhile, Reuters seems to think that Roe v. Wade — which could soon be curtailed by the conservative majority Supreme Court, that has agreed to hear a key abortion case in Mississippi — “established” the “constitutional right to abortion.”
This extraordinary characterization of the 1973 ruling, at best, displays a jaw-dropping degree of ignorance into what constitutional rights and the Supreme Court are in the first place. There is simply no constitutional right to obtain an abortion and (since the editors over at Reuters apparently need a refresher) the Supreme Court does not establish constitutional rights, it simply ensures that they are being protected and that no law goes against the Constitution.
Roe v. Wade, of course, has been slammed by critics for decades as a terrible ruling for this reason, let alone that it would go on to be used to destroy millions upon millions of unborn American lives.
The right to free speech, however, is a constitutional right; in fact, when the Bill of Rights was drafted, the Framers saw fit to place it right there at the top as numero uno — the First Amendment.
Just as it was a violation of this sacred right when pro-slavery advocates pressured lawmakers to pass laws limiting anti-slavery speech prior to the Civil War, it is now to prohibit anti-abortion speech, wherever it may take place.
While making death threats against escort clinics is certainly not protected speech, reaching out to abortion-seeking women and trying to talk them out of ending the life of their child by whatever legal means available, especially when that includes offering her help, are some of the most important things that the pro-life community can do to try to save babies.
And as long as the rights to do so are preserved and protected, we still have a shot at putting an end to this barbaric and immoral practice once and for all. After all, the more our nation devalues the sanctity of life, the less justification there is to preserve all of our natural rights in the first place, as the most important one of these is the preservation of life itself.
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