Harder but important to embrace after accused shooter Robert Dear killed three people, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and wounded nine others.

According to some abortion-rights activists, you can’t decouple that horrific rampage from the heated rhetoric used by abortion opponents. Antiabortion fever has been raised in people like Dear, they argue, by a recent series of controversial videos that show clinic workers talking about human organ harvesting.

Planned Parenthood officials insist the videos were edited to distort a fetal tissue donation program that operates within the law to benefit medical research, and forensic investigators agree.


As a result, “This isn’t about free speech,” said Tricia Wajda, director of public affairs for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. “This is asking people to recognize that words matter. Accuracy matters.”

But it is about free speech — and specifically about speech those of us who support abortion rights don’t like to hear. The language of abortion opponents is deliberately brutal. It is designed to strip away euphemisms like “choice.” It forces us to confront descriptions like “baby killer” and images like “baby parts.”

While it’s not pleasant to contemplate, speech like that can’t be silenced or — as Massachusetts learned the hard way — even kept at a polite distance.

The Supreme Court made that clear in McCullen v. Coakley, a unanimous decision in 2014 that struck down a Massachusetts law that required a 35-foot buffer between antiabortion “counselors” or protesters and a clinic entrance. The law came after a series of violent assaults on abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a deadly 1994 shooting attack at two women’s health facilities on Beacon Street in Brookline. But in a 9-0 decision, justices said it violated the First Amendment, by putting too high a restriction on speech to achieve the state’s interests in safety.


“The First Amendment doctrine is clear,” said Mark L. Rienzi, the lawyer who represented the plaintiff, Eleanor McCullen. “You can’t simply silence speech you don’t like. The right response is to prosecute the bad guys, to attack the people who do the actual wrong thing.”

Of course, that means addressing the bad guys and the harm they cause after it has occurred.

But as a matter of law, that’s the way it is.

As far as the controversial Planned Parenthood videos, Rienzi, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, said, “none of that comes close to meeting the legal standard of incitement. That’s speech someone disagrees with. Talking about what you think abortion is, is not incitement to violence. People have been saying ‘abortion is murder’ for a long time.”

After the Supreme Court decision, Massachusetts enacted a new law that allows peaceful, nonthreatening demonstrations that don’t block entrances, within any range of reproductive health care facilities. That standard is much less clear than a line drawn on a sidewalk.

In a practical sense, the loss of the buffer zone law meant hundreds of protesters could pack the sidewalk outside the Commonwealth Ave. Planned Parenthood clinic last August to pray and call upon Congress to cut off funding for the organization. Clinic patients who must walk through demonstrations like that lose what Wajda calls “those last seven seconds, when they have nobody in their face . . . to take a deep breath and go in to see their doctor and access the compassionate health care they need and deserve.”


It’s hard to write that women entering the clinic don’t deserve those seven seconds of peace, whether they are simply getting birth control or keeping an appointment for a safe and legal abortion. But in the end, the same institution that gave us Roe v. Wade also gave us McCullen v. Coakley. The rule of law must be accepted in both.

In the same spirit, Planned Parenthood can’t shut down the videos, no matter how misleading they may be. They can’t shut down the abortion debate, no matter how vitriolic it can get.

And sadly, no one can stop a nut with a gun from feeding off any of it.

Now, keeping the gun from the nut is another matter for robust debate.

I #standwithguncontrol.

Joan Vennochi can be reached at vennochi@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Joan_Vennochi.

Correction: An earlier version of this column misspelled Tricia Wajda’s last name.