Reporting from Oakland — Just a few blocks off Oakland's busy Jack London Square, Walter Hoye, a soft-spoken Baptist minister, was standing outside an abortion clinic, doing his best not to get arrested.
Dressed in black and wearing his "Got Jesus?" ball cap, Hoye, 52, of Union City, Calif., held the hand-lettered sign he always brings: "God loves you and your baby. Let us help you." His black wire-rimmed sunglasses, perched halfway down his nose, gave him a faintly Hollywood air. In fact, he looked more like actor Don Cheadle than a public menace.
This was in May, but a few months earlier, Hoye became the first person convicted of breaking a 2008 Oakland law that creates an 8-foot buffer zone, or "bubble," around people entering abortion clinics.
His January conviction stemmed from his presence at a clinic, Family Planning Specialists Medical Group, on two Tuesdays in the spring of last year, when he tried to talk women out of ending their pregnancies. In the parlance of abortion foes, this is "sidewalk counseling." Those who support abortion rights call it harassment.
Until the May 31 slaying of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, this sort of clash seemed an artifact of the 1990s, when a spate of violence against abortion providers prompted federal and state laws protecting access to clinics. But the conflict between unimpeded access to medical treatment and freedom of speech has never gone away.
"Prior to this ordinance," said Jackie Barbic, executive director of Family Planning Specialists, "the protesters would actually put their heads in patients' cars and get very close to them. You would have mom and dad bringing their teenage daughter in, and these people would follow them along the sidewalk to the front door of the office." Some women, she said, were coming in for procedures after miscarriages. "Our patients were shocked and upset, and some of the partners would get very angry."
Hoye and his attorneys, who work with the antiabortion Life Legal Defense Foundation, are challenging the buffer-zone law in federal court.
U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer heard arguments from the city and Hoye's attorneys June 26. At the hearing, Breyer said the law appeared constitutional on its face, but Hoye's attorneys pressed him to consider their claim that it's unconstitutional as applied because it singles out abortion foes.
