A pro-life pregnancy clinic sued California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Tuesday for carrying out a “politically motivated campaign” against pro-life organizations that offer abortion pill reversal (APR) treatments to women who change their mind about ending their unborn babies’ lives.
In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in San Diego, California, Culture of Life Family Services alleges Bonta is actively violating its free exercise of religion and free speech rights under the U.S. and California constitutions by “targeting protected speech and activities engaged in for the sole benefit of pregnant women who have ingested — whether voluntarily or via trick or force— mifepristone.”
The AG’s quest to demonize APR and anyone who touts it, the lawsuit from the Catholic nonprofit that operates state-licensed COLFS Medical Clinic in San Diego, California continues, also “violates the Fourteenth Amendment rights of pregnant women to not be forced to undergo or continue an abortion.”
APR, which pregnancy centers often offer free of charge, gives women and their babies a second chance at survival. Despite Democrats’, corporate media’s, Big Tech’s, and Planned Parenthood’s attempts to paint the medication as unsafe, several studies have determined that increasing intramuscular and high-dose oral progesterone in women who ingest the abortion drug regimen and regret it is “safe and effective” and resulted in “no apparent increased risk of birth defects.”
As COLFS notes in the lawsuit, “there is no evidence of a single woman harmed by Abortion Pill Reversal.” Yet, Bonta has repeatedly disregarded the science on APR “in favor of abortion-on-demand or his view of what constitutes ‘credible scientific evidence.’”
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Bonta issued a consumer alert accusing his state’s pregnancy centers of offering only “limited and potentially misleading” care simply because they offer women alternatives to ending their babies’ lives. Bonta’s Department of Justice also launched a government web page encouraging Californians who “believe their right to reproductive healthcare, including accessing abortion, has been violated” to report it to his office.
The “lawfare” against pro-lifers didn’t stop there. By September 2023, Bonta started an official campaign on five of California’s pregnancy centers with a lawsuit accusing them of making “fraudulent and misleading claims to advertise an unproven and largely experimental procedure called ‘abortion pill reversal.’”
“But the idea that the speech of purely charitable pregnancy help organizations amounts to ‘fraudulent misrepresentation’ by offering women no-cost services is incongruous. The subtext of Bonta’s argument is that pregnancy help organizations may speak, but only if they speak the State’s message,” the COLF lawsuit states.
Democrat attorneys general-led attacks on no-cost abortion pill reversal are ironic given chemical abortions’ proven history of causing dangerous and sometimes fatal complications to women and children.
Mifepristone, which is responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions, is also responsible for a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits for side effects such as hemorrhage, “fast, weak pulse,” “shortness of breath,” diarrhea, dizziness, headache, vomiting, “pain” across the back, arms, neck, and abdomen, and myriad other risks.
“Abortion Pill Reversal gives these women a second chance to choose life, a choice that Bonta and the abortion industry would strip from her,” Thomas More Society Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation Peter Breen said in a statement. “In his quest to silence pregnancy help ministries, Bonta is violating Culture of Life Family Services’ right to speak and aid women in exercising their reproductive privacy rights,”
Paul M. Jonna, partner with LiMandri & Jonna LLP and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, called Bonta’s actions “politically motivated and blatantly unconstitutional.”
“With all of the crime and corruption in California, it is tragic and beyond comprehension that AG Bonta – our state’s top law enforcement officer, with a $1.3B budget – is using his vast resources to target pregnancy centers and strip women of their right to procreative choice, and their right to continue with a pregnancy through the safe and effective Abortion Pill Reversal process,” Jonna noted.
