On Friday, Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto announced that she supports Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s bill to shut down pro-life charities that help provide resources and counseling to pregnant women:
Crisis pregnancy centers consistently mislead vulnerable women about the health care services they provide. I joined my colleagues in cosponsoring the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act to crack down on false advertising about abortion services by these fake clinics.
— Senator Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto) September 9, 2022
While Democrats think they have the upper hand on the issue of abortion, attacking these pro-life charities could very well backfire on Cortez Masto, who is up for reelection in November.
Since the leak of the Dobbs decision in May, there has been a wave of vandalism and fire-bombings of pro-life pregnancy centers. Cortez Masto’s Republican opponent Adam Laxalt condemned the assault on pregnancy resource centers on Friday:
Despite the violent attacks targeting crisis pregnancy centers, @CortezMasto is spending her time spreading lies and demonizing these charities.
I’m proud to stand with women who give vulnerable and poor mothers support and the ability to choose life. https://t.co/MZdNY3zwWH
— Adam Paul Laxalt (@AdamLaxalt) September 9, 2022
The bill Cortez Masto is now co-sponsoring threatens to shut down pro-life charities if they promote prohibited “disinformation” — a term not defined in the legislation — as I reported in July:
This 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.