BOSTON (Reuters) - Massachusetts enacted the toughest restrictions in the United States on protesters at abortion clinics on Tuesday with a law that forces them to stay 35 feet away.
The law signed by Gov. Deval Patrick takes immediate effect and expands on legislation from 2000 that sought to keep protesters 6 feet from a patient within an 18-foot (5.4-metre) zone outside the state's 10 clinics that perform abortions.
The state government said in a statement that the old law, especially the 6-foot rule, had proven difficult to enforce.
"By widening the buffer zone around reproductive clinics, we will protect patients from the harassment that so many have encountered as they seek care," said Patrick, a Democrat.
Governor Patrick? Legislature folk? You are lying. Period.Unless you consider hearing Rosaries prayed or receiving information providing alternatives to what anybody with any sense at all would consider a drastic and dangerous measure "harassment," you're flat out lying.
(On the other hand, the babies who are killed may rightly claim "harassment.")
Since this was framed as "emergency" legislation, the bill went into effect today. (Off topic, perhaps, but one wonders why the legislature couldn't act maybe a decade or so faster to, for example, finish the bleeping "big dig.")
What this means is that women and men contemplating abortion will have less or perhaps no access to alternative choices.
And that more babies will be legislated to death.
Not incidentally, I have heard nary a protest of this legislation from the Archdiocese of Boston.
