Catholic Anti-Abortion Activist Asks Supreme Court to Review N.J. 'Buffer Zones' Law
She argues that banning 'sidewalk counseling' of women in the zones outside abortion clinics violates the First Amendment.
By Gary Gately
A Catholic pro-life activist in New Jersey has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a First Amendment challenge to a city law that bans “sidewalk counseling” of women entering abortion clinics.
In her petition to the Supreme Court, Jeryl Turco argues that Englewood’s “buffer zones” forbidding pro-lifers from approaching women within eight feet of abortion clinics violates her right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution.
For more than 15 years, Turco has spoken to women approaching the clinics to try to dissuade them from having abortions, handed out rosaries and literature about prenatal care and invited the women to accompany her to a pregnancy crisis center across the street.
She often tells women approaching an Englewood clinic “we can help you” and “we are praying for you.”
Attorneys with the conservative Christian legal organization American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), who are representing Turco, seek to overturn a January 2024 Third Circuit U.S.Court of Appeals ruling affirming a lower court decision that the law is constitutional because it is “narrowly tailored, accords with the First Amendment and is not overbroad.”
The appeals court found that the law served the city’s interests in protecting the health and safety of its citizens and their right to seek medical services, including at abortion clinics and facilities providing gender-transition procedures, also covered by the law.
The city said it adopted the ordinance in 2013, imposing a maximum penalty of a 90-day jail term and a $1,000 fine for violations, as a way to deal with aggressive protests from an evangelical group called Bread of Life.
(Turco, who is not affiliated with Bread of Life, sued the city to challenge the law and had prevailed in a lower court.)
The Third Circuit appeals court cited the 2000 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hill v. Colorado, upholding a ban on sidewalk counselors approaching women in an eight-foot buffer zone outside abortion clinics.
In December 2023, the Supreme Court let stand the 23-year-old Hill precedent when justices declined to hear a Catholic sidewalk counselor’s challenge of a buffer zone in Westchester County, a New York suburb.
But ACLJ attorneys argued that Hill should be overturned, noting that several Supreme Court justices have criticized it as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech.
The ACLJ attorneys also cited the Sixth U.S. Circuit of Appeals 2022 ruling in Sisters for Life v. Louisville-Jefferson County that a "buffer zone" around a Kentucky abortion clinic's entrance violates the First Amendment, and the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a similar law in Massachusetts on grounds that it violated the First Amendment in McCullen v. Coakley.
In a statement, the ACLJ said: “Our client, Jeryl, and counselors like her engage in gentle, personal dialogues with women entering abortion clinics, providing them with alternative options and support. These counselors operate from a place of deep concern for women and the unborn, striving to present information and care that are not available within abortion clinics.”
Englewood officials had no immediate comment.