In a trial set to begin June 24, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta is asking a court to do something that should alarm every American, regardless of where they stand on abortion: punish nonprofit organizations with ruinous fines for speaking about a lawful medical treatment.
The target is not fraud. These charities offer their services for free.
It is not patient harm. There is no evidence of any patient being harmed.
It is not even illegal conduct. The underlying treatment remains perfectly legal.
The target is speech.
Heartbeat International and Real Options are pro-life nonprofits that provide information and care to women who first take the abortion drug but regret that choice and want to continue their pregnancies. California wants to impose penalties approaching $20 million because these charities have dared to tell women that another option may exist.
Twenty million dollars. That number alone should tell us what this case is really about.
No reasonable observer can believe that bankrupting charities is a proportionate response to truthful and non-misleading statements about a free service designed to help a woman exercise her constitutional right to continue her pregnancy. This is not consumer protection. It is political warfare conducted through the machinery of a government that wishes to silence speech it does not like.
What’s most remarkable is what California cannot prove.
After years of investigation, subpoenas, discovery, and litigation, the attorney general has failed to identify a single woman harmed by APR treatment. Not one. No parade of victims. No evidence of widespread deception. He set up a website practically begging for complaints and still could not muster a single woman claiming she was misled or harmed.
Instead, seven women have publicly shared the stories of how Heartbeat International and Real Options helped them successfully reverse their abortions. Three mothers are slated to testify from the stand about their joy at reversing their unwanted abortions.
Still, the state asks the court to punish the very charities who helped these women continue their wanted pregnancies simply because government lawyers disagree with their viewpoint on the scientific evidence regarding APR.
That is a dangerous precedent.
Scientific disagreement is not fraud. If it were, much of modern medicine would not exist. Medical consensus is not handed down from on high. It evolves. Researchers debate. Physicians challenge prevailing views. Studies are published, criticized, replicated, and revised.
The proper response to disputed science is more debate, more research, and more evidence – not government censorship backed by eight-figure penalties.
Yet that is precisely what California seeks.
Hellbound and Down 