By Maria V. Gallagher, Legislative Director
In her new book Tipping Points: How to Topple the Left’s House of Cards, cable television host Liz Wheeler points out numerous abuses of liberty while also providing a blueprint for rebuilding America from the ruins created by radical far-left policies.
Among the abuses she highlights is a 2015 California law known ironically as the “California Reproductive FACT Act.”
With the swift-moving daily news stream, you might not remember this perverse piece of legislation, which required pregnancy resource centers to post ads for free abortions, funded by taxpayers, in their waiting rooms. As Wheeler deftly notes, “The California government was compelling speech by private citizens.” As a result, operators of pregnancy help centers “were forced to choose between violating their consciences and violating the law.”
Imagine—you set up a center to help empower pregnant women, and the state makes you advertise for a process that will take the life of a helpless preborn child. The word “unbelievable” just doesn’t cover it. The legislation was downright Orwellian in nature, placing the state in the role of monstrous Big Brother.
Wheeler reminds us that in March of 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the legal case which followed. In June of that year, the High Court ruled that the California statute in all likelihood violates the First Amendment right to free speech.
Justice Kennedy, then considered the “swing vote” on abortion-related cases, wrote a concurring opinion in which he described the law as 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.”
Kennedy scolded California lawmakers stating it “is not forward thinking to force individuals to be an instrument for fostering public adherence to an ideological point of view they find unacceptable.”
The California law shows the extremes to which pro-abortion politicians will go in order to impose their extremist agenda. They are so committed to not only supporting but expanding abortion that they would readily pass measures forcing people to violate their consciences.
Thankfully, the pro-life movement is ever-vigilant, working to stop pro-abortion legislation in its tracks. But the threat of expansion of abortion is ever-present as long as Roe v. Wade remains in place.