MINNEAPOLIS– Minneapolis has softened an ordinance that banned the obstruction of entrances and driveways to abortion clinics after anti-abortion activists sued to challenge it on the grounds of freedom of expression.
The city council is quiet this month the regulation has been amended to exclude constitutionally protected activities and agreed to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees. Brian Gibson, CEO of Pro-Life Action Ministries, said in an interview Friday that it amounted to an acknowledgment by the city that the law violates free speech.
“They accepted blame because they violated our constitutional rights,” Gibson said.
Pro-Life Action Ministries is sending “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 established in 2022, was intended to protect patients at the Planned Parenthood clinic in the Uptown neighborhood from group members who would approach patients as they pulled into the parking lot there. Gibson said they never blocked an entrance, but tried to get people to roll down their windows to grab literature or talk.
Minneapolis was the only city in the state with such a rule. Gibson said their most immediate concern when they filed the lawsuit in 2023 was overturning the Minneapolis ordinance, but he acknowledged they also wanted to avoid St. Paul, where a much busier Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, by adopting something similar, which it never did.
The final judgment in favor of Pro-Life Action Ministries and three of its sidewalk consultants was filed in federal court Thursday.
Nationally, in the past year alone, several people have been convicted under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, known as the FACE Act, or similar laws for physically blocking the entrances to abortion clinics. This also includes activists Detroit, New York City, Washington, DCAnd Mount Juliet, Tennwith some receiving prison sentences of up to three to five years.
Towards the end of a long meeting which mainly dealt with other topics on December 5, the Minneapolis City Council went into closed session to approve the agreement on legal fees, and then returned in a very short open session to unanimously exempt “any person or group engaged in conduct protected by the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of Minnesota or federal law or Minnesota law.”
The law still prohibits physically blocking entrances to clinics, and council vice president Aisha Chughtai said this is in line with the FACE Act.
She said the council wants to ensure people have access to health care, including abortions, and expressed support for Planned Parenthood.
“We also want to make sure that we make very specific exceptions to ensure that First Amendment rights are protected and that our local government 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 provided a statement nearly identical to what Chughtai said at the council meeting.
“They changed their ordinance and repaired the damage that was done there. It was a total victory for the free speech people,” said Peter Breen, head of litigation at 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 will continue to be protected from people blocking or obstructing the driveway or sidewalk.”
Breen said they will file a bill for attorney fees soon, but their latest estimate was around $600,000.
The Thomas More Society and related groups are litigating nationally over similar restrictions, Breen said. They have asked a federal appeals court to block a similar ordinance in Clearwater, Florida. They are also fighting similar measures in New York’s Westchester County, 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 upheld a Colorado buffer zone requirement in 2000 in a case called Hill v. Colorado, Breen noted that the Supreme Court recently in its Dobbs concludeswhich struck down the constitutional right to abortion, criticized the Hill decision, saying the previous abortion rulings “have perverted the doctrines of the First Amendment.”
Gibson said his members are sometimes successful in convincing people who come to Minnesota clinics to cancel their abortions. He said they meet at St. Paul’s clinic almost every day, even going there on Sundays when the clinic is closed, just to pray. And he said they scored a victory on the first day outside the Minneapolis clinic when they approached a woman who had parked on the street.
“We saved a baby,” he said. “A woman decided not to go ahead with her abortion appointment.”