The senator says pro-life charities could be shut down under her bill if they ‘mimic Planned Parenthood’s colors’ and engage in other acts of supposed ‘disinformation.’
The Massachusetts Democrat says pro-life charities could be shut down under her bill if they 'mimic Planned Parenthood’s colors' and engage in other acts of supposed 'disinformation.'
T his week, Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren escalated her war on crisis pregnancy centers. These pro-life charities not only help women in poverty choose life instead of abortion, but they also help women after babies are born — providing clothing, diapers, housing assistance, and more. Warren wants to “shut them down all around the country” on the grounds that they purportedly spread “disinformation” about abortion.
“In Massachusetts right now, those crisis pregnancy centers that are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help outnumber true abortion clinics by three to one,” Warren told an NBC affiliate in Boston. “We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts and we need to shut them down all around the country.”
Warren has authored a bill that would do just that, as a recent National Review editorial explained:
Under Warren’s bill, [pregnancy center] charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.
On Thursday afternoon in the Capitol, I asked Warren if she could give any examples of what would be considered prohibited “disinformation” under her bill. “The point is for these centers to make clear up front that they’re not there to provide abortions; they’re there to prevent people from having abortions and they provide no abortion services,” Warren said.
“If [pregnancy centers] are trying to mimic Planned Parenthood’s colors and Planned Parenthood’s logo and to imply to the public that if you come here, you could get abortion services, I think that’s a real problem,” she added.
When I asked Democratic senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, a cosponsor of Warren’s bill, what would constitute prohibited disinformation under the bill, she replied: “I couldn’t tell you.”
“At these kinds of pregnancy whatever centers, that they can be told [a] different kind of information, like, ‘Abortion causes something or other’—that those are not true. That kind of thing,” Hirono added.
Would an advertisement saying “Pregnant? Need help?” or “Considering abortion? Need help?” be a prohibited “misleading” statement if a center didn’t perform abortions? “I don’t know. That’s all I’m going to say,” Hirono replied.
Warren wouldn’t say if a simple disclaimer on a pregnancy center’s website that it does not perform abortions — something many already have — would protect a pregnancy center from fines.
Asked why the bill doesn’t specify what counts as prohibited speech about abortion, Warren told me: “We don’t define prohibited language in any statute. That’s what we do by agencies. I mean, that’s a hundred years of law.”
Democratic Hawaii senator Brian Schatz, another co-sponsor of the bill, said: “I think it would get pretty challenging to list all the potentially misleading statements possible.”
If Warren’s bill were ever enacted and upheld as constitutional, it is not hard to imagine how it would come back to haunt Democrats. Would the FTC, under a Republican administration, fine Planned Parenthood 50 percent of its revenues — that would be a fine of at least $150 million (likely much more in the wake of its Dobbs windfall) — if a Planned Parenthood clinic used “misleading” language to describe abortion and the scientific realities of a human being in the fetal stage of development?
Warren’s suggestion that crisis pregnancy centers could be shut down if they “mimic Planned Parenthood’s colors” seems to be as absurd as it is unconstitutional. Those colors are pink and blue, colors traditionally associated with baby girls and baby boys.
Former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards once falsely claimed the organization provides mammograms: ‘If this bill [defunding Planned Parenthood] ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are gonna lose their health-care access — not to abortion services — to basic family planning, you know, mammograms,’” Richards said in 2011.
Asked if Planned Parenthood could be fined under the bill if it falsely claimed to provide mammograms, Warren replied: “The question is: Are they trying to mislead people bringing them in the door? Nobody should be doing that.”
But Warren’s bill would not direct the FTC to shut down a clinic that falsely claimed it provided mammograms. The only prohibited disinformation under the bill would be statements “related to the provision of abortion services.”
Warren’s heated rhetoric about crisis pregnancy centers comes as many around the country have been vandalized and firebombed after the leak of the Dobbs decision and its formal release.
TRIGGER WARNING: these pictures depict the inside of one of the "predatory" crisis pregnancy centers that exist to trick pregnant women into not aborting their unborn baby. pic.twitter.com/H7JPV5BfDt
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 12, 2022
Here's that predatory crisis pregnancy center on the morning of June 3. Just look at that malicious woman who spends every day helping pregnant mothers and searching for baby car seats to donate to struggling families. Gross. pic.twitter.com/siG2GlTYp1
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 12, 2022
One reason for the new anger directed at these long-established centers is that they easily dispel the lie that the pro-life movement stops caring about babies the moment they are born.
During congressional testimony this week, Erin Hawley of Alliance Defending Freedom pushed back against attacks on pregnancy centers: “They are not fake centers. In 2019, they served 1.85 million families, provided $266 million worth of goods — of car seats, of baby formula, of diapers, of things that women really need.”