Pro-Life Charity and Freedom of Speech

A battle which seems a little odd to me in that I'm not sure why people could ever be taken to court on such grounds, but there you go.  It's "lying" or "using deceptive practices" to say that abortion is wrong?  Progress reported by CatholicVote.  Excerpts follow.

In a monumental decision protecting free speech and women’s health, a federal judge in Baltimore today issued a permanent injunction against a law targeting pro-life pregnancy centers just because they give women free help from the prolife perspective...

The judge notes in the decision that the law burdens all pro-life centers, not just ones that supposedly engage in deception: ”the Ordinance does not provide a ‘carve-out’ provision for those limited-service pregnancy centers which do not engage in any deceptive practices.” There’s a good reason why the law doesn’t limit its application to false advertising: NO PRO-LIFE CENTERS ENGAGE IN FALSE ADVERTISING, ergo such a law wouldn’t hurt pro-life centers. That’s why the abortion industry regulates people solely on the basis that they are pro-life, not on the basis that they have done anything wrong.

And whereas informed consent for abortion laws rightly regulate information given by a licensed doctor prior to an abortion, laws against pro-life pregnancy centers attack private unlicensed citizen speech solely because they speak on the issue of pregnancy from the prolife perspective. There’s no justification to pass laws against pure, non-commercial speech on an important topic related to public health...

Just as no one would stomach it if a fast food chain lobbied to persecute the pro-healthy-eating speech of non-profit health advocacy group, we can hope that legislators in other cities will think twice about passing unconstitutional speech restrictions on citizens solely because they are talking about the public issue of pregnancy from one particular, compassionate, free perspective...