Supreme Court takes up free speech challenge to California abortion law
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear an anti-abortion group’s free-speech challenge to a California law that requires “crisis pregnancy centers” to notify patients that the state offers subsidies for contraception and abortion.
The challengers say the disclosure law violates the First Amendment because it forces the faith-based pregnancy centers to send a message that conflicts with their aim of encouraging childbirth, not abortion.
It will be the second major case this term in which a conservative, religious-rights plaintiff is challenging a liberal state law on free-speech grounds — and both came from the same lawyers.
The Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom sued on behalf of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and was charged with violating the state’s civil rights law. The justices are due to hear his appeal on Dec. 5.
ADF lawyers also challenged the California disclosure law on behalf of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, which describes itself as “a faith-based, Christian ministry that seeks to glorify God by proclaiming the sanctity of human life, both born and unborn.” The group represents 110 pregnancy centers in California, and it contends the disclosure provisions amount to unconstitutional “compelled speech.”
The key issue, said Michael Farris, ADL’s president, is whether “California can put its thumb on one side” of the scale and require a faith-based center “to promote a pro-abortion message.”
The case presents a clash between the state’s power to regulate the medical profession and the Constitution’s protection for the freedom of speech. Historically, states have had broad authority to regulate physicians and medical providers to protect patients from fraud and substandard care. But in recent years, doctors have sued and won claims that state lawmakers had gone too far and were wrongly interfering with the doctor-patient relationship.
In North Carolina, abortion doctors sued and won a freespeech challenge to a law that would have required them to describe to their patients a sonogram of a developing fetus. In the case, informally dubbed Docs vs. Glocks, physicians in Florida sued successfully to block a state law that would have barred them from asking patients about whether they had guns at home.
California lawmakers passed the disclosure law two years ago after concluding that as many as 200 pregnancy centers in the state sometimes used “intentionally deceptive advertising and counseling practices that often confuse,
misinform and even intimidate women” about their options for medical care.
The law, known as the Reproductive FACT Act, says these centers must disclose whether they have a medical license and have medical professionals available. They must also post a notice in the waiting room that says “California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services, including all FDA-approved methods of contraception, pre-natal care and abortion.” The notice includes a phone number for a county social services office.