In a loss for abortion opponents, the US supreme court on Monday declined to take up two cases involving “buffer zone” ordinances, which limit protests around abortion clinics and which anti-abortion activists have spent years trying to dismantle.
The two cases dealt with buffer zone ordinances passed by the cities of Carbondale, Illinois, and Englewood, New Jersey. In filings to the supreme court, which is dominated 6-3 by conservatives, anti-abortion activists argued that these ordinances ran afoul of the first amendment’s guarantees of free speech. They also asked the justices to overturn a 2000 ruling called Hill v Colorado, which upheld a buffer zone law in Colorado.
The justices didn’t explain why they declined to hear arguments in the cases, but the far-right justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have preferred to take them up. In a dissent outlining his desire to take the Carbondale case, Thomas wrote that he believed Hill “lacks continuing force”, in part due to recent rulings such as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the federal right to abortion.
“I would have taken this opportunity to explicitly overrule Hill,” he wrote. “Following our repudiation in Dobbs, I do not see what is left of Hill. Yet, lower courts continue to feel bound by it. The court today declines an invitation to set the record straight on Hill’s defunct status.”
The Illinois case involved a 2023 ordinance that limited people from getting within 8ft of another individual if that individual is within 100ft of a healthcare facility, such as Carbondale’s multiple abortion clinics. In the wake of Roe’s demise, Carbondale’s clinics had become a haven for people fleeing the abortion bans that now blanket much of the US south and midwest.
The anti-abortion group Coalition Life sued over the ordinance, vowing to keep up the court fight even after Carbondale repealed it. The “gamesmanship” over the ordinance, the group argued, only proved that “Hill will continue to distort both the first amendment and public debates about abortion unless and until it is overruled”.
The New Jersey case, meanwhile, was brought by an anti-abortion protester named Jeryl Turco, who asked the justices to strike down a 2014 ordinance. That ordinance bans people from coming within 8ft of the entrances of certain healthcare facilities in Englewood – including abortion clinics – unless they are patients, employees or passersby.
Abortion providers and their supporters have spent years defending the idea of buffer zones, pointing to the high rates of violence and harassment that occur in and around US abortion clinics. Over the last half-century, clinics have weathered more than 40 bombings, 200 arsons and 300 burglaries, according to the National Abortion Federation. Anti-abortion activists have also killed at least 11 people.
Abortion clinics have also long relied on the protections of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face, a federal law that is meant to penalize people who vandalize reproductive health clinics or who threaten, obstruct or injure the individuals trying to enter those clinics. But after Donald Trump took office in January, his justice department vowed to significantly curtail investigations into alleged Face violations. Trump also pardoned several anti-abortion activists who had been recently convicted for violating Face.
In the years since it overturned Roe, the supreme court has shown hesitation around newer abortion cases. In 2024, the justices rejected an attempt to limit access to mifepristone, a common abortion pill – but left the door open for a lower court to continue the case. The justices also punted on a case that questioned whether federal law requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions. That case is also continuing in a lower court.
Still, the supreme court is set to rule in at least one abortion case this term. In April, the high court will hear arguments in a case over whether South Carolina can cut the abortion provider Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid funding.
