It took just two weeks for Massachusetts lawmakers to undo a lawsuit that spent almost seven years winding its way through our labyrinthine court system before ultimately landing at the U.S. Supreme Court, where a unanimous decision might have put the issue to rest.

When the majority of members of the Roberts court came together on June 26 to declare that a 35-foot buffer zone outside of abortion facilities in the state was an infringement of the First Amendment, there was much rejoicing in the pro-life camp.

Eleanor McCullen, a 77-year-old grandmother who was the lead plaintiff in the case, told me the ruling was a miracle.
“It restored my faith in America,” she said.

But even the decision itself indicated that sidewalk counselors in Massachusetts still might face challenges on their way to saving lives. The majority opinion issued by the court provided a road map of how the commonwealth could legally set up an impediment to free speech outside of abortion businesses, suggesting that the state “could enact legislation similar to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994” or “consider an ordinance such as the one adopted in New York City that not only prohibits access to a clinic but also makes it a crime to ‘follow and harass another person within 15 feet of a reproductive health-care facility.’”

But the bill signed into law July 29 by Gov. Deval Patrick — with would-be Massachusetts Statehouse successor Martha Coakley and some of the state’s abortion profiteers at his side — did not follow that map.

According to a press release from the governor’s office, the new law empowers police officers to disperse sidewalk counselors who are “significantly impeding” access to a facility. After an order is issued, those subject to it have to stay 25 feet from the center’s entrance for eight hours. They can face arrest and may be sued for damages.

Michael DePrimo, an attorney for McCullen, described the new law as both unnecessary and unconstitutional.
“If a citizen is threatening public safety, he or she can be arrested under current state or federal law and then enjoined by a judge, based on evidence and testimony. The new law signed by the governor ignores those common resources and instead invites state censorship by enabling police to order peaceful citizens to stand on a 25-foot line for the remainder of the abortion clinics’ business hours,” he said in a statement. “The new law is unconstitutional not only because it is vague and overbroad, but also because it purports to grant to law enforcement the power to issue a temporary restraining order — a power that may only be exercised by courts.”

As DePrimo also noted in his statement, abortion-business operators have a financial incentive for keeping sidewalk counselors away from their doorways. Under the new law, workers would only have to tell police that they or their clients feel unsafe to have the counselors pushed back 25 feet — and possibly arrested and sued. The selling of abortion could then continue unfettered.

DePrimo is keeping an eye on what happens next outside of Massachusetts abortion businesses. But with our attention focused on the blurred lines outside, business as usual will carry on inside. And what a bloody business it is.

For the upcoming season of EWTN’s Defending Life series, which I co-host, I interviewed a Massachusetts woman named Catherine Adair, who will offer viewers a glimpse inside the same Commonwealth Avenue Planned Parenthood, of which Mrs. McCullen can be found outside every Tuesday and Wednesday.

When she became pregnant at 19, Adair, at her mother’s urging, chose abortion, and then she became a pro-abortion advocate. When a job at Planned Parenthood opened up right after she graduated from college, she jumped at the chance to work for the organization that performs more than one-quarter of this nation’s legal child murders each year.

“I thought Planned Parenthood was pro-woman,” Adair said. “I wanted to be part of the cause.”

Her entry-level job was to schedule appointments and accept payments for abortions. But soon enough, she was outfitted with a white coat and a stethoscope, shown how to take a woman’s blood pressure and pulse and given the responsibility of deciding if a woman was healthy enough to have an abortion. In the “counseling” sessions she led, she helpfully told women they could carry their pregnancies to term, make adoption plans or terminate the pregnancies that very day. “Problem” solved.

“We were told not to say ‘abortion,’ ‘fetus,’ ‘baby,’ ‘embryo,’” she said. About the abortion, women were told the doctor “would gently extract the contents of their uteruses.”

Adair recalled that most of the women did not ask questions about the procedure or the baby: “We were happy to keep them ignorant.”

In her next job at Planned Parenthood, she became a medical assistant and was tasked with getting women into the exam rooms and up on the table. When the doctor came in, “if they were lucky, he would make eye contact with them,” she recalled. Minutes later, the doctor would head off across the hall to kill another baby, and it was Adair’s job to get her patient into the recovery area as quickly as possible. Sometimes the women would be bleeding. Sometimes they would be fainting. But off to recovery they went.

Next, it was someone else’s job to pour remains of the child into a strainer and look for the “products of conception.” Adair said a kind of gallows humor prevailed at Planned Parenthood, with some of the workers using the phrase “pieces of children” instead.

Adair continued to believe she was helping in a noble cause — until she saw a second-trimester baby ripped apart, limb from limb.

“Everything I believed was a lie,” she knew at that moment. “Everything I had done was murder.”

After the Supreme Court ruling was undone by the new law, I contacted Adair again to ask her what she thought.

This is what she told me:

“As far as the new law, I think it shows the extremes to which the D.A. [district attorney], the state Legislature and the governor are willing to go to suppress free speech in this state,” she said. “It shows how closely they work with the Planned Parenthood corporation, so much so that the abortion giant’s profits are put before the rights of Massachusetts citizens. It remains to be seen how the police will decide to implement the new law, but, clearly, they are sympathetic to the pro-abortion side.”

She added that it was ironic that the facility that was involved in the lawsuit was the one where she worked. “We would always warn women who made appointments that the ‘protesters’ were violent, and they shouldn’t talk to them, but none of the pro-lifers were ever in the least bit violent. In fact, the clinic has bullet-proof glass, a private entrance garage, a metal detector and an armed guard. The only thing the buffer zone protects is the profits.”

How was the state of Massachusetts able to thumb its nose at the Supreme Court with this new law? Because voters in the state put pro-abortion politicians into power.

“Choice” is so ingrained in Massachusetts politics that, this fall, voters will choose from a field of three pro-abortion candidates for governor: Martha Coakley, Charlie Baker and Steve Grossman. Let this be a warning to all of us:

Unless we are careful, voters in every state could face this kind of stacked candidate slate.

This fall, every vote counts. Every Catholic and every Christian has a duty to vote — and to vote pro-life. If a politician can’t respect the rights of the unborn, he or she won’t uphold yours.

Janet Morana is executive
director of Priests for Life.