Minneapolis softens law on obstructing abortion clinics in response to free-speech lawsuit

Minneapolis has softened an ordinance that prohibited the obstruction of entrances and driveways to abortion clinics after anti-abortion activists sued to challenge it on free-speech grounds.

The City Council this month quietly amended the ordinance to exclude constitutionally protected activities and agreed to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees. Brian Gibson, chief executive officer of Pro-Life Action Ministries, said in an interview Friday that it amounted to an admission by the city that the law violated the freedom of speech.

“They were accepting fault for having violated our constitutional rights,” Gibson said.

Pro-Life Action Ministries sends “sidewalk counselors” to Planned Parenthood clinics in Minneapolis, St. Paul and elsewhere to try to dissuade people from having abortions. The ordinance, which the city enacted in 2022, was designed to protect patients of the Planned Parenthood clinic in the Uptown neighborhood from group members who would approach patients as they drove into the parking lot there. Gibson said they never blocked any entrances, but would try to get people to roll down their windows to take literature or talk.

Minneapolis was the only city the state with such a rule. Gibson said their most immediate concern when they filed the lawsuit in 2023 was to overturn the Minneapolis ordinance, but he acknowledged that they also wanted to prevent St. Paul, where there's a much busier Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, from adopting something similar, which it never did.

The final judgement in favor of Pro-Life Action Ministries and three of its sidewalk counselors was filed in federal court Thursday.

Nationwide, several people have been convicted in the last year alone under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, known as the FACE Act, or similar laws for physically blockading abortion clinic entrances. That includes activists in Detroit, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Mount Juliet, Tennessee, with some getting prison sentences as high as three to five years.

Toward the end of a long meeting that dealt mostly with other topics on Dec. 5, the Minneapolis City Council went into closed session to approve the agreement on legal fees, then returned in a very brief open session to unanimously exempt “any person or group engaging in conduct protected by the United States Constitution, the Minnesota Constitution or federal or Minnesota law.”

The law still prohibits physically blocking clinic entrances, and the city council's vice president, Aisha Chughtai, said it's consistent with the FACE Act.

She said the council wants to make sure people have access to heath care, including abortions, and voiced support for Planned Parenthood.

“We also want to be sure to provide very specific carveouts to ensure First Amendment rights are protected and ensure our local authority remains intact,” she told her colleagues at the meeting.

Chughtai did not immediately return messages seeking comment Friday. In response to a request for comment from the city attorney's office, a city spokesperson supplied a statement that was nearly identical to what Chughtai said at the council meeting.

“They amended their ordinance and repaired the damage that was done there. It was total victory for the free-speech folks,” said Peter Breen, head of litigation for the conservative Thomas More Society, which represented the plaintiffs.

Planned Parenthood North Central States, which was not a party to the lawsuit, said in a statement that under the revision, “Patients continue to be protected from people blocking or obstructing the driveway or sidewalk.”

Breen said they’ll file a bill for the attorney’s fees soon, but that their last estimate was in the $600,000 range.

The Thomas More Society and allied groups are litigating similar restrictions nationwide, Breen said. They’ve asked a federal appeals court to block a similar ordinance in Clearwater, Florida. They’re also fighting similar measures in Westchester County of New York, San Diego, and Detroit.

And they’ve asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a challenge to an ordinance in Carbondale, Illinois. While the Supreme Court in 2000 affirmed a Colorado buffer zone requirement in a case called Hill v. Colorado, Breen noted that the high court more recently in its Dobbs decision, which struck down the constitutional right to abortion, criticized the Hill decision, saying its previous abortion rulings “have distorted First Amendment doctrines.”

Gibson said his members sometimes succeed in persuading people who come to the Minnesota clinics to cancel their abortions. He said they gather outside the St. Paul clinic nearly every day, and even go there Sundays when it's closed just to pray. And he said they had a victory on their first day back outside the Minneapolis clinic when they approached a woman who had parked on the street.

“We had a baby saved,” he said. “A woman decided not to go through with her abortion appointment.”