The U.S. Supreme Court. (Courthouse News photo/Jack Rodgers)
(CN) The Supreme Court refused Monday to take up anti-abortion activists’ challenge to a Pittsburgh ordinance creating protest-free buffer zones around abortion clinics, but a conservative justice said the court should hear the issue when a more developed case comes before it.
In a statement announcing the petition for writ of certiorari was denied, Justice Clarence Thomas said he agreed with the court’s decision not to hear the case but also argued the buffer zones impose “serious limits on free speech.”
In her petition to the court, Nikki Bruni, a Pittsburgh leader of a religious anti-abortion campaign known as Forty Days for Life, claimed that the 15-foot buffer zone extending out from the door of Pittsburgh health care facilities unfairly prohibits “sidewalk counselors” from engaging in “quiet, one-on-one conversations with women” who visit the clinics.