338
Stevens, J., dissenting
could not have refuted the claim that they interfered with the right to travel by demonstrating that they indiscriminately attacked local civil rights activists as well as nonresidents.
In this case petitioners have deliberately blockaded access to the destinations sought by a class of women including both local and interstate travelers. Even though petitioners may not have known which of the travelers had crossed the state line, petitioners unquestionably knew that many of them had. The conclusion of the District Court that petitioners "engaged in this conspiracy for the purpose, either directly or indirectly, of depriving women seeking abortions and related medical counselling services, of the right to travel," 726 F. Supp., at 1493, is abundantly supported by the record.
Discrimination is a necessary element of the class-based animus requirement, not of the abridgment of a woman's right to engage in interstate travel. Perhaps nowhere else in its opinion does the Court reject such obvious assumptions of the authors of § 1985(3). The Reconstruction Congress would have been startled, I think, to learn that § 1985(3) protected freed slaves and their supporters from Klan violence not covered by the Thirteenth Amendment only if the Klan members spared local African-Americans and abolitionists their wrath. And it would have been shocked to learn that its law offered relief from a Klan lynching of an out-of-state abolitionist only if the plaintiff could show that the Klan specifically intended to prevent his travel between the States. Yet these are the impossible requirements the Court imposes on a § 1985(3) plaintiff who has shown that her right to travel has been deliberately and significantly infringed. It is diffi-cult to know whether the Court is waiting until only a few States have abortion clinics before it finds that petitioners' behavior violates the right to travel, or if it believes that petitioners could never violate that right as long as they oppose the abortion a woman seeks to obtain as well as the travel necessary to obtain it.
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