Supreme Court says crisis pregnancy centers do not have to provide women abortion information

Centers and clinics established to persuade women to continue their pregnancies cannot be required to tell their patients about the availability of state-offered services, including abortion, a divided Supreme Court said Tuesday.

The court’s conservatives said a California law at issue probably violates the First Amendment. It required what are called crisis pregnancy centers — which offer prenatal care and help when the baby is born — to post notices or tell clients about the state’s services.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the 5-to-4 decision .

He said that the “government-drafted script” specifically mentions abortion — “the very practice that petitioners are devoted to opposing.”

“Requiring petitioners to inform women how they can obtain state-subsidized abortions, at the same time petitioners try to dissuade women from choosing that option . . . plainly alters the content of petitioners’ speech,” Thomas wrote.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the dissent for the court’s liberals, and read parts of it from the bench.

[Does California abortion law protect women or force clinics to deliver message they abhor? Supreme Court to decide.]

He said the court has repeatedly upheld state laws that provide a script for doctors when they are counseling women seeking abortions.

“If a state can lawfully require a doctor to tell a woman seeking an abortion about adoption services, why should it not be able, as here, to require a medical counselor to tell a woman seeking prenatal care or other reproductive healthcare about childbirth and abortion services?” Breyer wrote.

“As the question suggests, there is no convincing reason to distinguish between information about adoption and information about abortion in this context,” he added.

Breyer was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

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