Chicago Beats Challenge to Abortion Clinic Bubble Zone Law

A Chicago law that prohibits anti-abortion activists from protesting, leafleting, or counseling within eight feet of a person in the vicinity of an abortion clinic is constitutional, the Seventh Circuit said.

Abortion clinic buffer zone laws impose serious burdens on core speech rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit said Feb. 13. But a 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a substantially similar law required the court to find for the city, it said.

Declaring Chicago’s law unconstitutional, moreover, would create a circuit split, the court said. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld ...