New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit against anti-abortion advocacy group Red Rose Rescue and repeatedly labeled it a terrorist organization in a press conference on Thursday afternoon.
James is asking the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to create a 30-foot buffer zone around abortion facilities in her state to prevent all members of the group from engaging with staff, volunteers, and patients.
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The lawsuit targets Red Rose Rescue, a Christian organization, and five specific members of the group “for invading reproductive health care clinics, threatening staff and clinicians, and terrorizing patients,” according to the press release.
James cited three instances between April 2021 and July 2022, during which the named defendants entered abortion facilities in the state and refused to leave the premises.
“Red Rose Rescue is an anti-abortion group whose members conspire to illegally trespass into private medical facilities that perform abortions and shut down or physically obstruct the provision of all reproductive health services, refusing all requests to leave by staff and law enforcement,” the lawsuit said.
Dr. Monica Migliorino Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and Red Rose Rescue participant, told the Washington Examiner that James’s actions are “grossly unfair.”
The organization’s website says that its members “peacefully talk to women scheduled for abortion” and offer them roses to choose not to go through with the procedure. “Those who participate in Red Rose Rescues are quiet, loving, and completely peaceful,” Miller added.
“Should the unborn still ‘totter to execution,’ Red Rose Rescuers stay in the place of execution in solidarity with their abandoned brothers and sisters, performing a non-violent act of defense through their continued presence inside the killing centers remaining with them for as long as they can,” the group says on its website.
Red Rose Rescue’s code of conduct says that its members are not to engage in violence or resist arrest.
“Unjust imprisonment is a spiritual extension of the rescue and an opportunity to continue to witness to the unborn whom Red Rose Rescuers sought to defend,” according to the group’s website.
The lawsuit highlights this and other elements of the code of conduct, such as not accepting legal guilt or submitting to rules of probation, as evidence that “criminal trespass” is “a core mission of their group.”
James said in the press briefing that the 30-foot buffer “will apply to this terrorist group,” denying that the aim of the lawsuit is to address all anti-abortion advocacy.
“I refer to them as terrorists because of their activities,” James said.
“Terrorism doesn’t save babies from abortion — love saves babies from abortion — and Red Rose Rescuers are committed to acts of love,” Miller said.
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James said, however, that the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, protects those seeking abortion from harassment and intimidation and will be strictly enforced under her leadership.
“Abortion is legal here in the state of New York,” James said.
