How Kamala Harris targeted pro-life pregnancy centers in California

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 28, 2024 / 15:07 pm

“First it was kind of a shock — we didn’t realize how hated we were, and going in there, how despised we were,” Marie Leatherby, who has led a pro-life pregnancy center in California’s capital for the past 13 years, told CNA over the phone.

Leatherby, the executive director of the Sacramento Life Center, found herself in the middle of a legislative and legal battle over the free speech rights of pro-life pregnancy centers during Vice President Kamala Harris’ tenure as attorney general of California.

From 2015 through mid-2018, Leatherby and others who ran pregnancy resource centers fought against a state law that forced those pregnancy centers to display notices that include information about where women could obtain an abortion.

“[This] went against everything we’re about — the reason we exist,” Leatherby said. “It went against our conscience.”

The Reproductive FACT Act, of which Harris was a “proud” co-sponsor and the primary enforcer, compelled pro-life pregnancy centers licensed by the state to display notices about public programs in California, including “abortion for eligible women.” It required that they provide a phone number for the local county social services office so women could determine whether they were eligible for the government programs, such as subsidized abortion.

Pro-life pregnancy centers provide hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free services and resources to women who are pregnant and to mothers of young children. They often set up their operations near abortion clinics to provide women with alternatives to abortion so they can have help in continuing their pregnancies. This includes free pregnancy services, such as ultrasounds and counseling, as well as material goods such as diapers and baby formula.

Sacramento Life Center and more than 70 other pregnancy resource centers that exclusively offered life-affirming pregnancy care were affected by the law mandating advertisements for abortion. Although the pro-life pregnancy centers joined together to lobby against the legislation, lawmakers passed the bill in 2015 with strong support among Democrats who were backed by pro-abortion organizations that often derided the services provided by the pregnancy centers.

When the law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2016, pregnancy centers were forced to either display notices or face repeated fines: $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for all subsequent offenses. Leatherby said Sacramento Life Center refused to provide the notices at first, but after other clinics began receiving fines in Los Angeles, she said her pregnancy center complied with the law.

“It was enforced and people came into our clinic to make sure we were posting [the notices] or we got written up in the papers as lawbreakers,” Leatherby said.

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) — which represents numerous pro-life pregnancy centers in California and nationally — sued Harris’ office on allegations that the law violated the First Amendment by compelling speech. NIFLA was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The United States Supreme Court ultimately ordered California to halt its enforcement of the law in June 2018, about a year and a half after Harris left office to serve as a senator.

The law was initially defended in court by Harris’ office and then subsequently by her successor, Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

“The law was designed to target pregnancy centers and coerce them to advertise for abortion,” ADF Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot, one of the lawyers who represented the pregnancy centers at the Supreme Court, told CNA.

“It was clearly politically motivated to harm pregnancy centers because they don’t toe the line on their radical abortion agenda,” Theriot added.

Five of the Supreme Court justices agreed, handing down a 5-4 decision that ordered California to stop enforcing the law based on First Amendment violations, finding that the law forced the pregnancy centers to provide a “government-drafted script” that compels them “to speak a particular message” on abortion.

“By requiring [pro-life pregnancy centers] to inform women how they can obtain state-subsidized abortions — at the same time [that they] try to dissuade women from choosing that option — the licensed notice plainly alters the content of [their] speech,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

Theriot said the effort to force pregnancy centers to advertise abortion was “weaponizing the law and the government against someone you don’t like because of their religious convictions and their pro-life views.” Specifically targeting the speech of pro-life pregnancy centers, he added, “was pretty unique when it was enacted in California” and promoted and enforced by Harris.

“That was the beginning of quite a bit of discrimination against pro-life pregnancy centers,” Theriot said.

Following in Harris’ footsteps, other states have tried to curtail the free speech rights of pro-life pregnancy resource centers in other ways. This includes New York Attorney General Letitia James filing a lawsuit against pregnancy centers that accuses them of “false and misleading” speech and an Illinois law that attempted to restrict the speech pro-life pregnancy centers use in advertisements. Both efforts were halted by judges.

“Other states have [since] been trying to target pregnancy centers and censor their speech on a regular basis,” Theriot said.