The Supreme Court on Monday passed on the chance to get rid of protest-free zones at abortion clinics, frustrating activists who say they need to get close enough to patients to make eye contact.
The court declined to hear challenges to a law in southern Illinois and to a 2014 ordinance in Englewood, New Jersey, that created a protest-free buffer zone around certain health care facilities.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken the cases.
Anti-abortion groups, as well as a number of Republican attorneys general, wanted the justices to use the challenges to overturn a 2000 decision − Hill v. Colorado − that upheld protest restrictions around abortion clinics.
The federal government has cancelled dozens of grants to study how to prevent new HIV infections...
