U.S. Supreme Court voids part of crisis pregnancy centre law
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court effectively put an end Tuesday to a California law that forces anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centres to provide information about abortion.
The 5-4 ruling also casts doubts on similar laws in Hawaii and Illinois.
The California law took effect in 2016. It requires centres that are licensed by the state to tell clients about the availability of contraception, abortion and prenatal care, at little or no cost. Centres that are unlicensed were required to post a sign that said so. The court struck down that portion of the law.
The centres said they were singled out and forced to deliver a message with which they disagreed. California said the law was needed to let poor women know all their options.
Justice Clarence Thomas in his majority opinion said the centres “are likely to succeed” in their constitutional challenge to the part of the law involving licensed centres. That means while the law is currently in effect, its challengers can ask a court for an order halting its enforcement.
“California cannot co-opt the licensed facilities to deliver its message for it,” Thomas wrote on behalf of his conservative colleagues, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. He called the requirement for unlicensed centres “unjustified and unduly burdensome.”
Justice Stephen Breyer said among the reasons the law should be upheld is that the high court has previously backed state laws requiring doctors to tell women seeking abortions about adoption services. “After all, the law must be even-handed,” he said in a dissenting opinion, joined by liberal colleagues Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and anti-abortion groups among others cheered the decision.
“Speakers should not be forced by their government to promote a message with which they disagree, and pro-life pregnancy centres in California should not be forced to advertise abortion and undermine the very reason they exist,” he said in a statement.
The abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice California was a prime sponsor of the California law. It contends that the centres mislead women about their options and try to pressure them to forego abortion.
Estimates of the number of crisis pregnancy centres in the U.S. run from 2,500 to more than 4,000, compared with fewer than 1,500 abortion providers, women’s rights groups said in a Supreme Court filing.
California’s law was challenged by the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, an organization with ties to 1,500 pregnancy centres nationwide and 140 in California.
Other states have laws that regulate doctors’ speech in the abortion context. In Louisiana, Texas and Wisconsin, doctors must display a sonogram and describe the fetus to most pregnant women considering an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. Similar laws have been blocked in Kentucky, North Carolina and Oklahoma.