Baltimore Must Pay Pregnancy Center $1.1 Million After Trying to Force It to Promote Abortions

One of the very rarely talked about after-effects of pro-life organizations going to court to protect their rights is that even when they win, they typically still have accrued a mountain of legal bills.

That is why a vote Wednesday by the Baltimore Board of Estimates “to pay $1.1 million to cover the legal fees of the Greater Baltimore Center for Pregnancy Concerns,” as Talia Richman of the Baltimore Sun reported, is so important.

Pro-lifers who read NRL News Today are aware of the favorable outcome in June in the case of NIFLA v. Becerra. The suit, brought by the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, challenged a California law requiring licensed pregnancy resource centers to disclose where women could receive free or low-cost abortions, and requiring unlicensed centers to insert state-dictated material in their advertising, thus violating the First Amendment rights of all pregnancy resource centers in the state.

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court agreed that the so-called Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act (FACT Act) was, in the words of now retired Justice Anthony Kennedy in his concurrence, “a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression.”

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