San Diego, CA - Roger Lopez, a dedicated pro-life activist, is appealing in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals a district court decision to dismiss his lawsuit challenging San Diego's discriminatory “no-speech zone” law that creates a constitutional double standard outside abortion facilities.

On behalf of Lopez, Thomas More Society attorneys argue San Diego’s speech-restricting ordinance shuts down peaceful pro-life sidewalk counseling, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Courts have repeatedly upheld the rights of pro-life individuals to offer information on life-affirming alternatives to pregnant women in need, and San Diego’s ordinance runs roughshod over those precedents.  

In their opening brief to the Ninth Circuit, TMS attorneys describe how the ordinance creates an egregious double standard: abortion facility employees, agents, and volunteers are completely exempt from all speech restrictions and can freely approach and harass anyone within the 8-foot “bubble zone,” while peaceful pro-life sidewalk counselors like Roger Lopez risk six months in jail for merely offering a leaflet or holding a sign that city officials deem harassing.

TMS attorneys also attack the breathtaking scope of the ordinance, highlighting that the ordinance turns hundreds of locations across San Diego into no-speech zones, without any justification. And they attack the ordinance's harassment and noise provisions as particularly draconian and discriminatory, giving pro-abortion city officials the power to stifle speech under a vague prohibition on “offensive” noise, which includes causing “discomfort or annoyance.”  

Finally, the brief launches a fresh attack on Hill v. Colorado, the 25-year-old Supreme Court decision that upheld no-speech bubble zones in front of abortion clinics. TMS attorneys rely on Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent in their recent case, Coalition Life v. Carbondale, to urge that Hill is a “zombie precedent” that must be disregarded.

“San Diego has created a constitutional travesty where Planned Parenthood employees can freely harass and pressure vulnerable women right up to the clinic door, but peaceful sidewalk counselors offering help and hope face criminal prosecution for normal conversation,” said Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at Thomas More Society.

“The city has made sidewalk counseling virtually impossible, which violates both the rights of pro-life advocates to speak and women’s rights to receive life-saving information. We will continue to defend Roger and pro-life advocates like him, protecting their right to serve pregnant women in need, and to put a permanent end to the ‘abortion distortion’ that has stripped so many Americans of their First Amendment rights in front of abortion facilities.”

The ordinance passed last year imposes a triple burden on sidewalk counselors, first forbidding them from coming near to passersby, second restricting the volume they can use by prohibiting noise that is “disturbing, excessive, or offensive … which causes discomfort or annoyance,” and third prohibiting signage or speech that is claimed to “aggravate” or “cause substantial distress.” In addition, the appeal also argues the city’s bias against pro-life speech, as evidenced in the close relationships between Planned Parenthood officials and city politicians and the thousands of dollars bankrolling their political campaigns.  

“Sidewalk counselors like Roger empower tens of thousands of expecting moms to choose life by connecting them with free pregnancy and parenting resources that local abortion businesses try to hide from them,” said Christopher Galiardo, Staff Counsel at Thomas More Society. “The ordinance was drafted to suppress pro-life views and approved by an openly hostile city council. I look forward to the Ninth Circuit, long a champion of free speech, vindicating Roger’s right to offer women in need help and hope.”

The Opening Brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in Roger Lopez v. City of San Diego, can be found here.