The U.S. Supreme Court sided with anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers Tuesday, saying a California law that requires anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to provide patients with notices giving them information about state-provided abortion and family-planning services is unconstitutional.
The court split 5-4 along ideological lines in the case, which sat at the intersection of free speech and abortion. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony Kennedy.
In the opinion, Thomas wrote that the law violated free speech because it forced pregnancy centers, which exist for the purpose of dissuading abortion, to tell patients about the practice they are devoted to opposing. The law, he wrote, "alters the content" of the speech the centers are trying to advance.
He wrote that speech must be open to different ideas and positions, and that "the people lose when the government is the one deciding which ideas should prevail." California had not "identified a persuasive reason" for the law, he wrote, saying that the state had other ways of informing women about the services they offer.
In a concurring opinion, Kennedy wrote the California legislators had targeted the centers because of their beliefs and that the law "compels individuals to contradict their most deeply held beliefs, beliefs grounded in basic philosophical, ethical, or religious precepts, or all of these."
Tuesday’sruling from the Supreme Court could affect similar laws enacted in other states, including Hawaii and Illinois.
With the court’s decision, a ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was reversed.
The Department of Justice and Republican leaders praised the decision.
“
We are pleased that today’s decision protects Americans’ freedom of speech," said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. "Speakers should not be forced by their government to promote a message with which they disagree, and pro-life pregnancy centers in California should not be forced to advertise abortion and undermine the very reason they exist."
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy called the California law a "slap in the face to pro-life groups that care for vulnerable women and their children."
The key question in the case was whether the Reproductive FACT Act, signed by California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015, violated the free speech rights of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...california-law
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Originally Posted by hanger4
