NARAL PRO-CHOICE MISSOURI RESPONDS TO SUPREME COURT’S RULING TODAY IN AN ABORTION-RELATED CASE
PRESS RELEASE
NARAL PRO-CHOICE MISSOURI RESPONDS TO SUPREME COURT’S RULING TODAY IN AN ABORTION-RELATED CASE
NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri called today’s decision in Scheidler and Operation Rescue v. National Organization for Women “ a setback in protecting women, doctors, and women’s clinics from violence cloaked in the robes of free speech.” The Court held that federal racketeering and extortion laws cannot be used to keep abortion protestors from trespassing on clinic property, blockading the clinics to prevent patients from accessing health care, and from using violence or threats of violence against clinic employees, escorts, and patients.
NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s executive director, Pamela Sumners, wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in the case for nurse Emily Lyons, who was severely injured and blinded in one eye by a bomb planted by Eric Robert Rudolph at a Birmingham women’s clinic in 1998. The blast killed a police officer. The bombing took place just weeks after clinic protestors were taken to court for contempt for violating a federal injunction prohibiting them from trespassing on clinic property or getting intimidatingly near the patients and escorts at the clinic. While Operation Rescue and Joseph Scheidler compared themselves to nonviolent civil rights protestors, the Lyons brief noted that nothing in the clinic blockaders’ actions or demeanor resembled Gandhi’s or Dr. Martin Luther King’s concept of civil disobedience: “Those who ‘express’ their protest of abortion with fists, projectiles and bombs do not stand in any venerated First Amendment tradition. They are in fact criminals.”
“Today’s decision is a blow to safety at the clinics, which provide not only abortion services but also general exams and emergency contraception that prevents abortions. Although the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act was enacted in 1994 and was intended to prevent clinic violence, clearly more protections are necessary. Emily Lyons has endured over 20 surgeries and Officer Sanderson died in a 1998 clinic bombing that was one of two committed by Eric Rudolph that year. In the past year, there has been an attempted firebombing in Louisiana at a clinic and an incident of arson at a Florida clinic. Not to mention almost 300 acts of vandalism and over 750 anthrax and bomb threats in the last decade. Taking away the avenue of civil liability under RICO will enable violent clinic blockaders to go back to their old tricks,” said Sumners.
NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri provides escorts to patients at Hope Clinic in Granite City and Planned Parenthood in St. Louis. It will celebrate its 20th year of doing so March 12 at an event at the Sheldon Galleries on Washington Blvd., with Emily Lyons as its special guest speaker. “The safety of the clinics and their patients is very important to us, and that’s why we have over 50 escorts in our program. Emily Lyons is a reminder that clinic violence and intimidation is very real and not a relic of the past.”
Contact: Pamela Sumners, Executive Director, 314-531-8616
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