A New Jersey Assembly committee has green-lit bills to punish pregnancy centers for 'deceptive information' and block cooperation with law enforcement from pro-life states.
TRENTON, New Jersey (LifeSiteNews) -- The New Jersey Assembly Community Development and Women’s Affairs Committee voted to advance three pieces of pro-abortion legislation, including to help women evade pro-life laws in other states and to potentially punish pro-life centers for offering alternatives.
The New Jersey Monitor reported that the three bills, all of which passed the committee on party lines, were to open pregnancy centers to punishment for so-called “deceptive or misleading advertising”; issue a travel advisory warning residents about abortion restrictions in other states; and prevent the state from cooperating with investigations or extradition requests relating to violations of other states’ pro-life laws.
“The issues before us today are not just policy matters,” Democrat state Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter declared. “They are matters of justice, dignity, and the well-being of families and communities across our state.”
Pro-life activists challenged that narrative in the crowded hearing room Thursday. “This is nothing more than a campaign of hostility toward faith-based, pro-life pregnancy centers, and it has resulted in actions that are unconstitutional, groundless, unduly burdensome, and purposefully harassing,” said Shawn Hyland of the New Jersey Family Policy Center.
“No precedent exists for applying the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act to the offering of free charitable services to members of the community who voluntarily accept them,” attorney Eileen S. Den Bleyker added.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, New Jersey Democrat Attorney General Matt Platkin issued a consumer alert in 2022 branding pro-life crisis pregnancy centers as “seek(ing) to prevent people from accessing comprehensive reproductive health care”; it was later revealed that his office collaborated with America’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, on the final draft of the alert.
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers challenged the attorney general in a still-ongoing lawsuit and this month state Republicans introduced articles of impeachment against Platkin for among other things “target(ing) pro-life pregnancy centers due to the organization’s religious speech and pro-life views by issuing an overbroad subpoena to one of these centers.”
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they “deceive” women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
Despite labeling itself “pro-choice,” the abortion movement is notoriously hostile to any and all types of alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns maligning crisis pregnancy centers to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
