DENVER — An anti-abortion protester is challenging a long-standing Colorado law meant to protect patients from harassment outside of health clinics.
The law sets up protest-free "buffer zones" around patients entering health clinics, including clinics that provide abortions.
The law's been on the books in Colorado since 1993. It limits protests within 100 ft of a healthcare facility, and protestors aren't supposed to get within eight feet of a patient inside that zone.
The woman who filed the suit, Wendy Faustin, calls herself a "sidewalk counselor." She claims those "bubble laws" in Colorado and municipalities like Denver and Englewood violate her free speech rights.
Faustin says that decision violates her right to "counsel" women in the hopes of changing their minds in the minutes before getting an abortion.
In the suit, she claims the First Amendment protects her right “to persuade women, one by one, not to make that choice” in “the most effective place, if not the only place, where that persuasion can occur."
Colorado's law has already been challenged and upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court 23 years ago.
Advocates say the bubble zone was created not only to stop harassment, but because people were endangering patients when it was created in the 90s.
Advocates with the Cobalt Abortion Fund, a donor-funded organization helping women access abortion services in Colorado, say they've seen an increase in legal challenges to abortion protections since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
"That's their own business. It's nobody else's business," Dani Newsum, an advocate with Cobalt, said. "But on top of those personal decisions, they're having to deal with the cacophony of people screaming at them or brands trying to cajole them into changing their own mind regarding a decision they have the perfect right to make. So, it is harassment."
Faustin is no stranger to filing lawsuits. She also filed a different lawsuit back in 2000, saying that she wanted to set up an anti-abortion banner off of a local overpass.
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