I think this is the wrong question. Should businesses think twice about locating next to abortion clinics is a better one.
In January Jivin J reported on pro-abortion Portland, Maine, businessman Mike Fink, who began sponsoring counterprotests and offering free food to abortion supporters who rallied against pro-lifers protesting in front of the Planned Parenthood next door to his restaurant.
Why should the prolifers feel bad? This evil man deserves God’s curse.
We have a consumer-driven marketplace. What a business markets results in profits or losses.
It’s hard to sympathize with someone who thinks every live birth is a failure.
If I were looking to set up a business somewhere, I’d be glad of the warning that an abortion mill operates in the area. I wouldn’t want my business anywhere near that.
I can’t say I feel much sympathy for the pro-abort whose restaurant business is negatively impacted by its proximity to an abortion mill. He needs to recognize (but probably won’t) that whatever his personal feelings are, his callousness towards women and babies is a minority opinion.
It should be fair warning to businesses that if they lease, they must have an “escape clause” for a named list of businesses that if they lease nearby, could harm the first businesses franchise.
This could include quite a list: establishments that serve liquor or have live music performance, head shops, pawn shops, discount and charity stores, medical clinics of several types as well as “family planning” or abortion clinics, stores with significant amounts of paints, compressed gases, or volatile chemicals, etc.
Nobody has forced those businesses to be near the abortion provider. I can think of it both ways: guilt by association or opportunity to distance yourself and capitalize on the protests.
Sorry, but sob stories on poor businesses that are “hurt” by freedom of speech means that those businesses are not capable of defending themselves from the market forces. The free market is darwinist by nature; either adapt and survive, or be extinct!
There is an old house that used to house an infamous abortion clinic in our area. The abortionist died several years ago, but the house still stands. It’s in a commercial part of the area. Now an air conditioning shop is located in the house, and they new occupants know what used to go on there, but feel no problem operating out of this building. I don’t know how anyone with any sort of feelings at all could, in good conscience, run a business out of a place that killed so many babies for so many years.
Poor wittle feller. He goaded the bull and got the horns.
To answer the question in the headline, in this case, no.