A pro-life organization that operates four pregnancy centers in Massachusetts has filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s governor and public-health commissioner, claiming that a $1-million state-funded “public-awareness campaign” targeting such centers violates their rights to freedom of expression and free exercise of religion.

The lawsuit, filed last Monday in U.S. District Court in Boston by the Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center and the American Center for Law & Justice, also names as defendants a pro-abortion advocacy organization and its executive director. The lawsuit argues that the organization has acted “under color of law” by helping to direct state-enforcement efforts against the pro-life centers.

The case is the latest example of pregnancy centers turning to the courts to resist pressure by government officials in abortion-friendly states who try to steer women away from them.

The plaintiff is A Woman’s Concern, of Revere, a working-class city north of Boston, which does business as Your Options Medical Centers.

Gov. Maura Healey, a first-term Democrat who also targeted pregnancy centers when she was the state’s attorney general, is the top defendant listed in the complaint. 

“Directed by Governor Healey and the other Defendants, this campaign involves selective law enforcement prosecution, public threats, and even a state-sponsored advertising campaign with a singular goal — to deprive [Your Options Medical Centers], and groups like it, of their First Amendment rights to voice freely their religious and political viewpoints regarding the sanctity of human life in the context of the highly controversial issue of abortion,” the pro-life organization’s complaint states.

The Massachusetts state government’s campaign against pregnancy centers, announced June 10, includes billboards along state highways warning women they should “AVOID Anti-Abortion Centers,” adding: “They MISLEAD you about your options if you’re pregnant.”

That’s false, said Theresa Larkin, the co-chairwoman of Pregnancy Care Alliance of Massachusetts, a coalition of nine pregnancy centers in the state. She said pregnancy centers that belong to the coalition have a 98% satisfaction rate from women who use them and that the centers “provide expectant mothers with accurate information about all their options and then offer them the support and tangible resources they need no matter what choice they make.”

“Unfortunately, pregnancy-care centers across Massachusetts have been under relentless and unfair attack from far-left politicians who want to discredit and destroy our efforts to help women. If they succeed, the many women and families who turn to us for emotional and material support will suffer the most,” said Larkin, who is also executive director of Your Care Medical Options, the plaintiff in the lawsuit, in a written statement through a spokesman.

According to the complaint, Your Care Medical Options lost the services of a physician because of threats the state’s public-health commissioner made in January 2024 against doctors and nurses who work for pregnancy centers and don’t adhere to what the commissioner described as state standards for staffing and for providing what he called “accurate and complete information” to patients. The organization’s buildings also sustained overnight spray-paint vandalism three times during the month after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, shown in images filed as exhibits with the complaint.

Representatives for the defendants in the lawsuit — Healey; state Public Health Commissioner Robbie Goldstein; pro-abortion advocacy organization Reproductive Equity Now Foundation Inc.; and Rebecca Hart Holder, the organization’s executive director — did not respond to a request for comment from the Register by deadline.

 

Targets of Government Scrutiny

Crisis-pregnancy centers — also known as pregnancy-resource centers — offer goods and services to women with problem pregnancies free of charge, in hopes of helping them and persuading them to give birth instead of getting an abortion. Pre-birth services may include pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and advice on how to be a parent. Post-birth offerings include diapers, formula and counseling, often until the baby is at least 1 year old.

Critics call them “anti-abortion centers,” “limited-services pregnancy centers” (because they don’t offer abortion) and “fake clinics,” and claim they lure pregnant women in with deceptive messages in order to give them a pro-life pitch instead of promoting abortion services.

In recent years, the pro-life centers have become targets of government scrutiny in abortion-friendly states, leading to lawsuits in at least nine states.

Such legal actions demonstrate that pregnancy centers aren’t accepting pro-abortion public officials’ attempts to stifle them, said Peter Breen, executive vice president and head of litigation for the Thomas More Society.

“This is becoming a nationwide issue of concern, but one where certainly the pregnancy-resource-center movement is being called to step up, and it is doing so,” said Breen, who founded two such centers in Illinois more than 15 years ago, by telephone. “It is answering the call and not taking this lying down.”

In December 2023, the state of Illinois settled a lawsuit brought by the Thomas More Society against a state statute banning what it called “deceptive practices” by pregnancy centers, after a federal judge found the statute “both stupid and very likely unconstitutional.” The state attorney general agreed not to enforce the law, and the state paid the Thomas More Society $155,000 in lawyer’s fees and expenses.

Alliance Defending Freedom settled a comparable case in Connecticut in January 2023, after concluding that the state attorney general there was not enforcing the statute. A comparable federal lawsuit in Vermont is pending, though the judge in that case this past June found that the pregnancy centers there “have stated a plausible claim for violation of their First Amendment rights.”

 

Abortion-Pill Reversal and State Governments

Some of the government pressure concerns abortion-pill reversal, a hotly contested approach to chemical abortions.

A chemical abortion usually requires two pills. The first pill, mifepristone, blocks the hormone progesterone; without it, the pregnancy can’t develop, in most cases killing the unborn child. The second pill, misoprostol, causes the woman’s body to expel the child’s remains.

Pro-life sources say that in some cases a chemical abortion can be reversed, if a woman who has taken mifepristone takes a progesterone dose quickly enough to block the effects of mifepristone. They claim this method succeeds more often than it fails.

Pro-abortion sources say it doesn’t and that it isn’t medically advisable for the woman. Each side cites studies to support its case.

Some pro-life centers offer abortion-pill reversal, while some others present it as an option to women without offering the service. In recent years, state attorneys general in certain abortion-friendly states have put heat on them.

The May 2023 Vermont statute targeting pregnancy centers, for instance, defines “Providing or claiming to provide services or medications that are purported to reverse the effects of a medication abortion” as “unprofessional conduct.”

State attorneys general in Washington state and New Jersey have investigated pregnancy centers over abortion-pill reversal, drawing lawsuits.

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, in May 2024 sued Heartbeat International and 11 affiliated pregnancy centers in state court for making what her complaint called “repeated and persistent misleading and/or false claims and omissions” about the “efficacy and safety” of abortion-pill reversal. Alliance Defending Freedom sued in federal court in Buffalo later that month on free-speech grounds.

On Aug. 22, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction allowing the pro-life centers to continue discussing abortion-pill reversal with women who come to them, finding that the pregnancy centers “are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment free-speech claim.”

Comparable lawsuits are pending in Colorado and California.

Gabriella McIntyre, legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Register that state officials in certain states are wrongly pressuring pregnancy centers to avoid offering abortion-pill reversal as an option, which she described as a viable medical approach with a significant success rate.

“When government officials censor pregnancy centers and take away this lifesaving option, women are forced to follow through with an abortion they don’t want,” McIntyre said by email through a spokesman. “Women deserve to know their options, and they deserve to have a chance to save their babies. And pro-life pregnancy centers should be free to serve women, men and children without unjust government harassment.”

The campaign against pregnancy centers in Massachusetts centers not on abortion-pill reversal but on the centers themselves.

The Massachusetts Legislature in March 2023 appropriated $1 million for a campaign against pregnancy centers. The budget also includes $250,000 for Reproductive Equity Now’s “free-abortion legal hotline” — which, as the pro-life center’s complaint notes, uses it to solicit complaints about pregnancy centers.

The American Center for Law & Justice, which is representing the pregnancy centers’ advocacy organization that sued state officials this past week, framed the state’s campaign as a way of protecting abortion providers.

“Pro-life centers represent one of the biggest threats to abortionists’ bottom lines — and our client is no exception,” the American Center for Law & Justice said in a written statement about the case. “They will do anything to shut them down, and liberal politicians in Massachusetts have been all too eager to help.”