Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 17, 2023 / 11:20 am
A federal appeals court this week sided with a group of pro-life protesters who claim the city of Washington, D.C., discriminated against them by arresting them for anti-abortion messages they had written with chalk in 2020.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said in its ruling Tuesday that the Frederick Douglass Foundation (FDF) and Students for Life of America (SFLA) had “plausibly” demonstrated that Washington police had violated the First Amendment rights of two protesters when they were arrested over a pro-life slogan they wrote in chalk on a city sidewalk that year.
The protesters had written “Black Preborn Lives Matter” on the sidewalk at a rally that occurred outside the Planned Parenthood Carol Whitehill Moses Center in Washington, D.C.
The pro-life rally occurred amid the larger Black Lives Matter protests that had swamped Washington that summer, as D.C. and many other U.S. cities saw protests, demonstrations, and sometimes riots following the police-involved killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in May 2020.