This still-image billboard warned Spanish speakers about pro-life crisis pregnancy centers near Route I-195 westbound in New Bedford, Massachusetts on Monday, June 24, 2024. Photo by M.J. McDonald for New Boston Post.
Those billboards could prove expensive.
A pro-life organization that operates four crisis pregnancy centers in Massachusetts has filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s governor and public health commissioner as well as a pro-abortion advocacy organization and its leader, claiming that their “overt viewpoint-based campaign of harassment, suppression, and threats” is violating the organization’s rights of free expression, free exercise of religion, and freedom of association.
The lawsuit targets the state’s campaign against crisis pregnancy centers, including billboards warning women away from them.
A Woman’s Concern Inc., of Revere, which does business as Your Options Medical Centers, brought the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Boston on Monday night.
State officials named as defendants named in the suit are Governor Maura Healey and state public health commissioner Robbie Goldstein — in their individual and official capacities, meaning they are being personally sued in addition to their position as state office holders.
Also named as defendants are Reproductive Equity Now Foundation Inc., an organization that advocates for legal and publicly funded abortion; and Rebecca Hart Holder, the organization’s executive director. The pro-life organization claims the pro-abortion organization and its leader have acted “under color of law” by helping state officials conceive and execute the state government’s campaign against crisis pregnancy centers.
“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 complaint states.
Spokesmen for Healey, Goldstein, Hart Holder, and Reproductive Equity Now Foundation could not immediately be reached for comment by New Boston Post late Tuesday afternoon.
Crisis pregnancy centers, which are also called pregnancy resource centers, provide goods and services free of charge to women with problem pregnancies before and after birth, in hopes of helping them and persuading them to give birth instead of getting an abortion.
According to the complaint, the state government’s anti-crisis-pregnancy-centers campaign, which began June 10, includes baseless statements that the centers are a threat to public health and that they publish false and misleading advertising “while actively urging citizens to report [pregnancy resource centers] to State law enforcement.”
State officials “have knowingly targeted pro-life [pregnancy resource centers] for repeated enforcement actions without a proper basis and based solely on [Reproductive Equity Now’s] unwarranted complaints, in violation of their rights to equal protection under the law,” the complaint states.
The defendants have engaged in a “blacklisting campaign” of intimidation, the crisis pregnancy center says, which have driven one doctor to quit the organization and threaten to make the pro-life organization “stop operating.”
“It is well-settled that viewpoint discrimination applied through threats of legal sanctions and other means of coercion and intimidation violates the United States Constitution where, as here, such measures chill protected First Amendment activities. That very kind of selective censorship scheme is evidenced here,” the complaint states.
Since Your Options Medical Centers is motivated by religious beliefs, the complaint states, the defendants’ actions also violate its right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The complaint notes Reproductive Equity Now receives public funds from the state government.
The Massachusetts Legislature included $1 million for what it described as “a public awareness campaign” targeting crisis pregnancy centers as part of the state’s fiscal year 2023 supplemental budget bill, which Governor Healey signed into law on March 29, 2023. (Fiscal year 2023 ran from July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023.)
The same line item, as the complaint notes, includes $250,000 for Reproductive Equity Now’s “free abortion legal hotline.” (It’s on page 5 of the budget bill, item 4513-1006.)
Source: Massachusetts fiscal year 2023 supplemental budget, page 5
According to the Your Options complaint, Reproductive Equity Now publishes a “guidebook” that encourages people “who have had a negative experience” with a crisis pregnancy center to call the abortion legal hotline “to report their case and to be referred to pro bono attorneys.”
“This is the same Hotline that receives direct financial support from the Commonwealth,” the complaint notes.
The public awareness campaign amounts to a state-funded effort to stifle crisis pregnancy centers because certain elected officials disagree with their point of view, the complaint states.
“Defendants’ choice of words goes far beyond mere disagreement or criticism; the State has repeatedly accused [pregnancy resource centers] of illegal behavior like deception, misrepresentation, and fraud. The State has publicly accused [Your Options Medical Centers] of actionable misconduct,” the complaint states.
The state’s accusations are false, the complaint says, arguing that state officials don’t even attempt to provide facts to back them up. One example is what the state calls false advertising.
“These labels of wrongdoing have been applied to Plaintiff [Your Options Medical Centers] despite the fact that a recent investigation expressly cleared it of these very accusations and found that Plaintiff YOM is not engaging in deceptive advertising. The State Defendants are simultaneously clearing Plaintiff YOM through formal investigations and continuing to classify Plaintiff YOM publicly as a wrongdoer,” the complaint states.
The complaint says that there are 21 crisis pregnancy centers in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit is the first case filed by the new Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center, an offshoot of the Massachusetts Family Institute. Samuel Whiting, a lawyer with the new center, signed the complaint.
Also signing the complaint are five lawyers from the American Center for Law & Justice.
The plaintiff is seeking a permanent injunction stopping the state’s anti-crisis-pregnancy-centers advertising campaign, along with monetary damages, among other things.
The complaint also seeks lawyer’s fees – a request that has proved expensive for some government entities that lose civil rights claims in federal court.
The city of Boston agreed to pay $2.125 million in lawyer’s fees after settling a federal lawsuit brought by a group that wanted to fly the Christian flag outside Boston City Hall but was initially denied, as New Boston Post reported in November 2022.
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This still-image billboard warned Spanish speakers about pro-life crisis pregnancy centers near Route I-195 westbound in New Bedford, Massachusetts on Monday, June 24, 2024. Photo by M.J. McDonald for New Boston Post. 
