The Supreme Court gives free speech to fake doctors, but not real ones

The Supreme Court this week declined to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit’s decision in EMW Women’s Surgical Center v. Meier; this had the practical effect of upholding a Kentucky law requiring abortion service providers to, among other things, perform an ultrasound and play a fetal heartbeat recording to a woman seeking an abortion.

Things were different, however, when antiabortion advocates last year challenged a California law requiring crisis pregnancy centers — established, the law said, specifically to dissuade women from having abortions — to post truthful information about the limits of their services and the availability of state-sponsored family-planning services. The Supreme Court viewed that law as an impermissible form of forced speech and held, 5 to 4, that it violated the First Amendment.

In the California case, NIFLA v. Becerra, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that California could not coerce speech from the activists who run and work at the antiabortion centers. The majority held that the law “impose[d] a government-scripted, speaker-based disclosure requirement” in violation of the First Amendment.