Pro-life group challenges city’s now-repealed ‘buffer zone’ law, potentially reshaping protest laws nationwide
By CARLY GIS
Saluki Local Reporting Lab for Capitol News Illinois
cgist@dailyegyptian.com
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade turned Carbondale into a critical medical hub: Following the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in 2022, three clinics offering abortion services opened in the small, liberal university town in conservative rural southern Illinois. It’s now the closest place for people across a huge swath of the South and Midwest seeking abortions they could no longer access in their home states.
But as quickly as the clinics opened, anti-abortion activists became fixtures outside them. They not only protested with chants and signs but also deployed “sidewalk counselors” whose mission was to intercept people seeking abortions before they entered the clinic. Clinic directors, staff and volunteers raised alarms about what they described as aggressive and misleading tactics used by various anti-abortion activists.
At a Carbondale City Council meeting in January 2023, witnesses – speaking during public comment – described disturbing behavior by protesters: They claimed they had misrepresented themselves as clinic employees or medical staff and directed patients to fake check-in stations, attempting to collect personal information under false pretenses, and that people had even used a ladder to peek over a security fence at one of the clinics. Afterward, the council voted unanimously to amend its disorderly conduct ordinance to make it illegal to come within 8 feet of a person without their consent within a 100-foot radius of a medical facility. The ordinance cited frequent acts of “intimidation, threats, and interference” requiring an increased police presence.
Now, the city faces a legal battle with potential national implications over the steps it took to protect the clinics: Coalition Life, a St. Louis-based anti-abortion group, has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the “buffer zone” ordinance, which has since been repealed, an unconstitutional infringement on First Amendment rights to free speech.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to decide on Friday whether it will take up the case, Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale. It had been scheduled for last week’s conference, but it was postponed.
Brian Westbrook, founder and executive director of Coalition Life, which sends volunteers and paid staff to Carbondale’s clinics, said the restrictions made it nearly impossible to get the attention of people entering the clinics.
“If you can’t approach them and have a conversation with them, it’s very difficult to provide resources and information to individuals,” he said in an interview last week.
Fifteen attorneys general representing states from across the Midwest and South that have restricted abortion access filed a joint brief in support of Coalition Life and against Carbondale, population 21,600.
They argued buffer laws like Carbondale’s, enacted in numerous cities across the nation, curtail rights to free speech “when they are needed most.”
“They cut off speech on a hotly contested moral and political issue,” the brief reads, “And they do so at the last place where the speech could be effective – outside an abortion clinic before a life-altering decision is made.”
Two lower courts have already dismissed the lawsuit, citing a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that upheld a similar Colorado law. It’s that 25-year-old decision, Hill v. Colorado, that anti-abortion advocates are seeking to overturn through challenges to Carbondale’s ordinance as well as a similar one in Englewood, New Jersey.
The petition asking the court to take up the case points out that in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the justices cited the Hill ruling that upheld Colorado’s buffer law as an example of cases that had “distorted First Amendment doctrines.”
“Dobbs should have made clear beyond cavil that Hill could no longer skew public debate on a divisive issue being returned to the people,” Coalition Life argued in its request for the court to hear the case. “Inexplicably, however, the City of Carbondale treated Dobbs as an invitation to enact a brand-new ordinance modeled on, and virtually identical to, the law upheld in Hill. The lower courts had no choice but to uphold that carbon-copy measure. This Court has a better option.”
But Andrea Gallegos, executive administrator of Alamo Women’s Clinic in Carbondale, called the claim of First Amendment infringement “very hypocritical.” She said protests at abortion clinics themselves infringe on privacy and people’s rights to access health care and make decisions about their own bodies. “You don’t drive to a dental appointment and have to have protesters stop you out in the driveway,” she said. “This only happens at abortion clinics.”
Patience Roundtree, director of advocacy and organizing for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, said protest activity is commonplace outside the organization’s clinics across the state, but there’s been “an uptick of anti-abortion extremists” since Roe was overturned. Its health center in Peoria was firebombed in August 2023. Due to extensive damage, the facility had to temporarily shut down. It reopened in June 2024.
“Fortunately for us, no patients, staff, supporters, were injured; that was done after hours,” Roundtree said. “But we’ve seen regular anti-abortion protesters, people who have been showing up for years with maybe a church group in the neighborhood, be recruited by other groups. Those same people have become emboldened and increasingly hostile, and at times, have needed to be removed by the police.”
Planned Parenthood is the most recent reproductive care organization to open a location in Carbondale. Its doors opened in December 2023, over a year after CHOICES Center for Reproductive Health and Alamo Women’s Clinic moved to Carbondale in fall 2022.
Coalition Life is persisting in its challenge of the city’s ordinance, despite Carbondale quietly repealing the buffer zone language from its disorderly conduct code in July, 18 months after it was enacted, and three days prior to Coalition Life’s petition to the Supreme Court. The repeal was approved in a 6-0 vote during a special city council meeting that lasted just four minutes. The ordinance was never enforced.
When asked about the case, Chief of Police and interim City Manager Stan Reno declined to comment, citing the city’s policy of not discussing pending legal matters.
Despite the repeal, Coalition Life, which is represented by Thomas More Society, a Chicago law firm known for taking up conservative causes, claims the ordinance’s passage has had a lasting impact, leading to what Westbrook deems “chilled speech.”
“It took them four minutes to repeal that, and assuming that we stopped fighting, it will take them four minutes to put the bubble zone back in,” Westbrook said.
Coalition Life participates in what they call “professional sidewalk counseling” at five abortion clinics; the three in Carbondale, one in Flossmoor, Illinois, and one in Kansas City, Kansas, according to its website. Westbrook said the sidewalk counselors are made up of staff members, who are paid to work sidewalk shifts, as well as volunteers.
“We don’t call it protesting because we aren’t there to protest,” Westbrook said. “We are there to offer real, tangible resources to women.”
Those resources include free ultrasounds and pregnancy tests, STD testing and “options coaching,” which can be conducted at Women’s Care Connect, a pregnancy care center in St. Louis, Westbrook said. He added that the organization also connects clients with external resources as needed, such as substance abuse recovery programs and financial assistance.
But Gallegos, the Alamo administrator, said much of what the anti-abortion organizations tell people outside her clinic is misinformation. “They tell them we don’t do ultrasounds when we do. They give them model dolls, trying to say that this is what your fetus looks like right now, and they’re inaccurate pictures.”
William Freivogel, a Missouri lawyer and journalism professor at Southern Illinois University, noted that the First Amendment is “not absolute.”
“There are all sorts of restrictions on speech, and in the case of abortion protests, where you have protestors sometimes getting in the face of patients seeking legal medical treatment, that is a situation where a protest bubble has been found by the Supreme Court in the past, (in Hill v. Colorado) to be constitutional,” he said.
Freivogel’s background in journalism involved covering the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. from 1980 to 1992. Though the court is in a new era, one that has upended the nationwide right to abortion access, he said this isn’t the kind of case the Supreme Court would typically take up on procedural grounds. The court usually prefers a cleaner case where the law “had actually been enforced and inhibited somebody from protesting,” he said, rather than one no longer even on the books. But he speculated that the court’s postponement of its decision whether to take up the case could be tied to the timing of the election and might signal that at least a few justices are interested. Even if they do take it up, which isn’t a given, Freivogel said it would likely be at least a year before a decision is made.
Westbrook denied any claims that Coalition Life activists engage in intimidating behavior. “On the sidewalk, there is no political speech, there’s no violence, there’s no yelling,” he said. “It’s very much a peaceful and prayerful discussion.”
Gallegos, the Alamo clinic director, believes buffer zones are necessary for patient safety. The protesters, she said, “already are intimidating to patients.”
“They try to wave and smile and get patients to stop for them, and then a lot of patients tell us they think they’re affiliated with the clinic and they’re not,” she said. “The buffer zone keeps them within a distance, away from our front entrance. And so once they’re in the parking lot, patients feel safer.”
Gallegos also noted that some activists record patients as they arrive.
“What they do about it with those videos, I don’t know, but the further away they can be kept from the entrance of the building, I think the better, and patients definitely feel safer,” she said.
If the Supreme Court decides to take up the case, it wouldn’t just affect Carbondale. It could have far-reaching implications for the types of activities anti-abortion activists can engage in outside clinics in states where abortion remains legal.
That’s the biggest concern for Tara Bell, a Planned Parenthood volunteer who helps escort patients safely through protests in Carbondale. “Even if we lose the bubble ordinance, we don’t want to lose more protections over squabbles with that particular organization regarding free speech,” she said.
Roundtree declined to speculate on what the court might do. Planned Parenthood’s top priority, she said, is “for everyone to have access to essential health care that they need, that they deserve.”
“We plan to do everything within our power to just ensure that our patients and our staff and our volunteer network are not only safe but taken care of,” she said.
Carly Gist is a journalism student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. This story was produced for Capitol News Illinois through the Saluki Local Reporting Lab, supported by grant funding from the Pulitzer Center and the Illinois Press Foundation.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
