The pro-abortion wing of the court, Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, would have let the state force organizations to carry a message with which they disagree.
The state had argued that it could not adequately promote abortion without having pregnancy centers do its work.
California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, has actively promoted abortion, even to the point of filing criminal charges against two pro-life activists who filmed, in public locations, abortion industry participants bragging about selling the body parts of unborn children.
In recent years, similar laws were totally or mostly overturned in cases in Austin, Texas; Montgomery County, Maryland; Baltimore; and New York City.
It was recently reported in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin that the federal government, in an analysis, said the ruling could have a significant impact on speech rights and related laws and regulations beyond the abortion issue.
“The parties in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra dispute whether California’s Reproductive FACT Act is a viewpoint – or content-based restriction on speech subject to strict scrutiny (and thus presumptively invalid) or a professional or commercial regulation subject to less exacting scrutiny,” the government analysis says.
“The path the court chooses could have implications for lawmakers both in the context of family planning or pregnancy-related services and, more broadly, in the regulation of professional and commercial activities.”
The most recent development in the issue came when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Baltimore ordinance imposing the requirement.
The court found that the ordinance violated the free speech clause of the First Amendment.
The opinion said: “The compelled speech at issue here raises particularly troubling First Amendment concerns. At bottom, the disclaimer portrays abortion as one among a menu of morally equivalent choices. While that may be the city’s view, it is not the center’s.”
The ruling also found the ordinance was an impermissible attempt by Baltimore officials “to use compelled speech as a weapon to run its ideological foes into the ground.”