Pro-life advocates from Coalition Life, the nation’s largest professional sidewalk counseling organization, are asking the United States Supreme Court to restore sidewalk counselors’ First Amendment right to offer compassionate support to abortion-minded women outside abortion facilities. The Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale, filed on July 16, 2024, by Thomas More Society attorneys and former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, asks the Supreme Court to overturn its heavily criticized decision in Hill v. Colorado.
In 2023, Carbondale, Illinois, passed a “bubble zone” law restricting speech about abortion, and the life-affirming alternatives and resources available to abortion-minded women. The restriction applied to public sidewalks outside “hospitals, medical clinics, and healthcare facilities”—which includes Carbondale’s three abortion facilities. The Carbondale law was modeled on, and was virtually identical to, the “bubble zone” law upheld in Hill, an earlier Supreme Court decision that upheld a Colorado “bubble zone” law. The Hill decision allowed states and local governments to ban the peaceful life-affirming speech of pro-life advocates on public sidewalks. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Hill, similar laws aimed at chilling pro-life speech near abortion facilities have proliferated nationwide, especially in abortion-permissive municipalities, and states such as Montana and New Hampshire.
In March 2024, after the sidewalk counseling organization sued the city of Carbondale, a federal appeals court cleared the path for Coalition Life to petition the Supreme Court to reconsider Hill. In dismissing Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale, the federal appeals court ruled that the arguments advanced by Coalition Life were “foreclosed” and the court remains “bound by Hill.” The appellate court reasoned that the Supreme Court—though it has questioned the case’s viability—“has not expressly overruled it.” Since the Supreme Court decided Hill in 2000, the case has come under fire for being out of step with the First Amendment and a prime example of the “abortion distortion” factor in case law. The Supreme Court itself, in its 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, singled out Hill as the leading example of the court’s abortion precedents having “distorted First Amendment doctrines”—suggesting its readiness to revisit the constitutionality of speech-restricting “bubble zone” laws.
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Carbondale, a southern Illinois college town with a population of just over 21,000, has become a major abortion hub for those seeking the procedure from across the Midwest and South. Historically home to zero abortion facilities, three abortion venues have taken root in the city in the two years following the landmark overturn of Roe v. Wade. Coalition Life maintains a sidewalk counseling presence at abortion facilities across Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. With the rapid growth of the abortion industry in the southern Illinois college town, Coalition Life expanded its sidewalk counseling efforts to Carbondale—where they found their ability to compassionately share the pro-life message hampered and their First Amendment rights violated by the city’s “bubble zone” law.
“For nearly a quarter of a century, sidewalk counselors like those who work with Coalition Life have been forced to live with ‘an entirely separate, abridged edition of the First Amendment’ when it comes to the kind of peaceful, conversational speech outside an abortion facility in which they wish to engage,” writes Paul Clement, Partner at Clement & Murphy PLLC and leading Supreme Court litigator, in the petition to the high court. “The denial of constitutional rights that Hill perpetuates is thus even more pronounced in Dobbs’ wake, making the need for this Court’s intervention more pressing now than ever…The question for this Court thus is not so much whether, as when, Hill should be overruled. The time is now.”
“Now that the Supreme Court has returned the abortion debate to the people and their legislators, it is more important than ever to restore the free speech rights of those who advocate for life in the public square,” stated Peter Breen, Thomas More Society Executive Vice President & Head of Litigation. “Hill v. Colorado was egregiously wrong on the day it was decided, and it remains a black mark in our law to this day. In the decades since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Hill, the Court has steadily eroded Hill’s shaky foundations in more recent First Amendment cases and, in the majority opinion which overturned Roe v. Wade, sounded the death knell for Hill’s distortion of our bedrock First Amendment principles. ‘Bubble zones,’ like the one in Carbondale, are an unconstitutional and overzealous attempt to show favor to abortion businesses, at the expense of the free speech rights of folks who seek to offer information, alternatives, and resources to pregnant women in need. It’s time to end, once and for all, the political gamesmanship places like Carbondale play with our free speech rights. We pray the Supreme Court grants certiorari in our case, to restore the First Amendment rights of pro-life sidewalk counselors like those at Coalition Life and finally give Hill a proper burial.”
“The ‘bubble zone’ ordinance has been nothing more than the continued and relentless persecution of our team on the sidewalk,” added Brian Westbrook, Executive Director and Founder of Coalition Life. “This fight won’t be over until Hill is overturned and thousands of municipalities across the nation, like Carbondale, understand you cannot trample on our rights.”
Read the Petition for Writ of Certiorari, filed on July 16, 2024, in the United States Supreme Court, by Paul D. Clement and Thomas More Society attorneys on behalf of Coalition Life, in Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale, here.
