Anti-Choice Advocates Track License Plates of Cars Parked at Clinics

Houston Chronicle: Anti-abortion activists adopt a new tactic: tracking license plates, by Brian M. Rosenthal:

Advocates say tactic is legitimate; critics contend that it is intimidation

On nearly every weekday morning between late 2010 and this spring, Eileen Romano stood outside a Beaumont abortion clinic to do what she could to fight a procedure she saw as morally wrong.

Unlike traditional so-called sidewalk advocates, however, Romano did not simply try to talk the arriving women out of having their abortions. She also sought to get the clinic closed with a tactic that is becoming increasingly common in the Texas anti-abortion community: tracking license plates.

Romano wrote down the numbers on the cars that parked outside the facility, checking to ensure the plates showed up twice - for a pre-abortion consultation required by state law and the procedure itself. If a car only came once, she said, it was a sign the doctor had done the abortion without a consultation, and the 63-year-old activist made a note to potentially report to state regulators. . . .

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I don't think the tactic of tracking license plate numbers can accurately be described as "new," but this purported rationale sounds ridiculously far-fetched: What if the driver was not there to obtain an abortion?  What if a patient came to the clinic a different way the second time?

-CEB