The Speech Police is After Pregnancy Centers

We have all seen for years that pro-abortion advocates are utterly intolerant of any opposition. They denigrate and marginalize any defenders of life and relentlessly target any politicians or public officials that fail their pro-death purity tests. They insist that everyone cooperate in their death cult, even to the point of forcing religious institutions to pay for abortions.

But few things bother them more than the idea that pro-life pregnancy centers still dare to dissent from their party line. Some new laws that have recently been enacted show how far they are willing to go. Casting aside any notion of free speech and free thought, they are now siccing the speech police on pregnancy centers.

These laws are from Vermont and Illinois. But it’s likely that similar laws will be coming to a pro-abortion city or state near you.

Although they differ in details, the laws have a number of characteristics in common.

Bogus Biased Legislative Findings

These laws all proclaim exaggerated “legislative findings” that parrot pro-abortion ideological buzzwords and rely on imaginary allegations of abuses. They claim that pregnancy centers systematically victimize vulnerable women by “deceptive, fraudulent, and misleading information and practices” (Illinois SB 1909).

When challenged at legislative hearings to produce evidence of such alleged offenses, the sponsors fumble, mumble, and dissemble.

At one hearing in Illinois, the sponsors were confronted with the results of a Freedom of Information Act request that found no evidence of any such complaint having been received in the previous ten years. An earlier law had been passed in Connecticut a few years ago, but their government has said that they have no plans to enforce it because they’ve never received a complaint.

But the legislatures didn’t let facts – or the absence thereof – get in the way of ideology, and they passed the laws anyway.

Favored and Disfavored Viewpoints

One of the classic violations of free speech rights comes when the government tries to suppress speech because it dislikes what a person is saying. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected such laws, saying that a lack of “viewpoint neutrality” is almost always a violation of the First Amendment:

“When the government targets not subject matter but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.” (Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819 (1995)).  

These laws try to get around this legal doctrine in subtle ways by how they define the organizations that will be subject to the law. The term they use is “limited service pregnancy center”, which they contrast with agencies that provide “comprehensive reproductive care”.

The only thing that differentiates those two categories is whether they provide or refer for abortions and emergency contraception. If you refuse to talk about those subjects because you’re pro-life, you fall within the law and may be in serious trouble.

But if you’re pro-abortion and willing to talk about abortions (or perform them), you’re exempt from the law and you can say anything you want with impunity. And we know that abortion clinics routinely lie to patients about what abortion is all about. But that apparently doesn’t matter.

It’s a classic case of the government taking sides – they favor the pro-abortion position, so they’re going to punish anyone who expresses a pro-life viewpoint that they disapprove.     

Weaponized Language

The attack on pro-life speech is even more obvious when you see what the law actually targets. The Illinois law, for example, forbids the use of “any deception, fraud, false pretense, false promise, or misrepresentation, or the concealment, suppression, or omission of any material fact”. The Vermont law bars any advertisement that is “untrue”.

But what in the world does all that mean? How can anyone trust state bureaucrats or politically-motivated officials to decide what is “deception”, “misrepresentation”, “untrue”, or a “material fact”? Whatever happened to the “marketplace of ideas” where people are free to speak their minds? Even when people are wrong, they still should have the right to speak freely about it.

When pressed at a legislative hearing, a representative of the state attorney general refused to answer any specific questions about what subjects would fall within the law. Instead, she said that it would all be decided on a “case-by-case basis”. She even refused to rule out going after someone who says that “abortion is a sin”, “life begins at conception”, or that “contraception is wrong”.

So a person might be hauled into court and fined up to $50,000 in Illinois if they express their religious beliefs about abortion being against God’s law. That should scare every religious person in our country, regardless of what they think about abortion.

Also, you can be punished if you “follow the science” about when human life actually begins. That should scare everyone.

Pushing Back

Fortunately, pro-lifers in Vermont and Illinois aren’t taking this lying down. Lawsuits have been filed, challenging the constitutionality of the laws. The Thomas More Society and Alliance Defending Freedom are representing pregnancy centers in those cases, which are still pending in federal district courts. The Illinois law has been temporarily put on hold by the court, pending further litigation.

There is a disturbing trend for the government, either directly or indirectly, taking sides in a debate over a subject of intense public interest, and penalizing points of view that it disapproves. When governments start to coerce people to adhere only to the approved party line, that’s the road to totalitarianism.

Consider the interesting parallel case of a law in California. In the aftermath of COVID, California passed a law aimed at fighting “misinformation” about the disease and treatments. It would punish any doctor who tells a patient any “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”

Whatever one thinks about COVID, that kind of law should send a chill up your spine. Does anyone trust any government, much less the government of that state, to decide what’s true or false or what’s “scientific consensus”?

A lawsuit was filed, a lower court judge put the law on hold, and it’s now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Here’s an amazing part of the case – even the ACLU filed a brief against the law because it was such an egregious violation of free speech rights! It’s unlikely that the ACLU, which is ardently pro-abortion, will oppose these speech police laws targeting pregnancy centers.

The lesson here is that pro-abortion forces will stop at nothing to remove any opposition to their agenda. They will trash the constitution to get what they want. They are relentless. And so we must be equally resolute in being alert and opposing any bill like this, wherever it appears.