Caring for women, the unborn seen as issues in
clinic buffer zone case
By Tanya Connor
Catholic News Service
WORCESTER, Mass. (CNS) -- Massachusetts pro-
life advocates who went to the U.S. Supreme Court to
hear oral arguments in an abortion buffer zone case said
caring for women and being the voice of the unborn are
among the issues at stake.
The case, McCullen v. Coakley, was brought by
several people who volunteer as “sidewalk counselors”
outside Planned Parenthood clinics in Boston,
Springfield and Worcester.
Under a 2007 state law, there are yellow semicircu-
lar lines painted 35 feet from the entrances to the clin-
ics, delineating how far away the sidewalk counselors
and abortion protesters must stay. The law prohibits
conversations about abortion within the zone by anyone
except employees of the abortion clinics.
The oral arguments were Jan. 15, and a ruling in the
case is expected before the court adjourns for the sum-
mer in late June.
After the arguments, Roderick P. Murphy told
The
Catholic Free Press
, Worcester's diocesan newspaper,
that being able to get into the high court and hear the
arguments firsthand “was very impressive -- the whole
thing. Being in the audience. Just getting into the
place.”
Murphy is director of Problem Pregnancy, a center
in Worcester which offers alternatives to abortion and
is located across from the Planned Parenthood League
of Massachusetts abortion clinic.
There were hundreds of people waiting to get in to
hear the proceedings. Some, like him and his wife,
Jean, had prior approval. Lead plaintiff Eleanor
McCullen was behind him, he said, and in the front row
was plaintiff Father Eric Cadin, a priest who does side-
walk counseling or praying outside the Boston Planned
Parenthood location.
“Thereʼs a certain aura,” he said of being in the
chamber where the Supreme Court hears oral argu-
ments. He noted the justices sit in big chairs; some
looked up at the ceiling or drank coffee at times.
So one wonders, are they listening?
“Oh, you know theyʼre listening,” responded
Roderick Murphy, a member of Blessed John Paul II
Parish in Southbridge. “They are fierce with those law-
yers.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. set up a perfect scenario
where two women stand inside a buffer zone, he said.
One tells a client the abortion clinic it surrounds is not
a safe place to go into. The other says it is safe. Why
should the first have no legal right to speak her message
when the second can speak hers because she represents
Planned Parenthood?
McCullen told the
Free Press
that when she and the
others in her group left the court, Nina Totenberg of
National Public Radio
brought her over to a micro-
phone to ask her questions. Totenberg had been stand-
ing inside a buffer zone while interviewing McCullen
in Boston a few weeks before, and seemed surprised
when the abortion clinic guard told her to move.
McCullen said she herself stood outside the line.
On the day of the oral arguments, McCullen said,
she told the reporters, photographers and others who
gathered to listen: “I care about the women and I care
about the unborn.”
Someone asked why she cares when she doesnʼt
know these people.
“Americans are very caring people,” she recalled
saying. When a disaster strikes, they help people they
don't know. However, she added, “We do take our
young from the womb.”
Connor is on the staff of The Catholic Free Press,
newspaper of the Diocese of Worcester.
Pro-lifers told to stay hopeful to overcome ‘shrine
to personal choiceʼ
By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The winter storm that
dealt a chilly body blow from the Great Plains to the
East Coast may have rendered Archbishop Charles J.
Chaput of Philadelphia unable to come to Washington
to celebrate the Jan. 22 closing Mass of the annual
National Prayer Vigil for Life, but the homily he wrote
made its way to thousands of hearing ears.
In it, he wrote of the virtue of hope and the confi-
dence that abortion can be overcome.
“The very existence of people who refuse to accept
evil and who seek to act virtuously burns the con-
science of those who donʼt,” Archbishop Chaput wrote
in his homily. “People who march and lobby and speak
out to defend the unborn child will be -- and are --
reviled by leaders and media and abortion activists that
turn the right to kill an unborn child into a shrine to
personal choice.”
He added, “Evil cannot bear the counter-witness of
truth. It will not coexist peacefully with goodness,
because evil insists on being seen as right, and wor-
shipped as being right.”
Archbishop Chaputʼs homily was read by Msgr.
Walter Rossi, rector of the Basilica of the National
Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, site of the Mass.
“Seventy years ago, abortion was a crime against
humanity. Four decades ago, abortion supporters talked
about the ‘tragedyʼ of abortion and the need to make it
safe and rare. Not anymore,” Archbishop Chaput wrote.
“Now abortion is not just a right, but a right that
claims positive dignity, the license to demonize its
opponents and the precedence to interfere with consti-
tutional guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly and
religion. We no longer tolerate abortion. We venerate it
as a totem.”
The archbishop said, “Optimism and pessimism are
equally dangerous for Christians because both God and
the devil are full of surprises. But the virtue of hope is
another matter. The church tells us we must live in
hope, and hope is a very different creature from opti-
mism. ... Hope is the conviction that the sovereignty,
the beauty and the glory of God remain despite all of
our weaknesses and all of our failures. Hope is the
grace to trust that God is who he claims to be, and that
in serving him, we do something fertile and precious
for the renewal of the world.”
Archbishop Chaput said, “All of us are here because
we love our country and want it to embody in law and
in practice the highest ideals of its founding.”
He added, “Over the past 41 years, the pro-life
movement has been written off as dying too many
times to count. Yet here we are, again and again, disap-
pointing our critics and refusing to die. And why is
that? Itʼs because the word of God and the works of
God do not pass away. No court decision, no law and
no political lobby can ever change the truth about when
human life begins and the sanctity that God attaches to
each and every human life.”
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January 31, 2014
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