ACLJ Files Reply Brief in Defense of Pro-Life Pregnancy Center Targeted by Massachusetts Officials

Government officials may have the right to express their views – but they cannot use the power of government to silence, punish, or retaliate against people for expressing views they oppose.

That is precisely what Massachusetts officials have done – and this week, together with our local counsel at Massachusetts Liberty Legal Center, we filed our reply brief in the First Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of Your Options Medical Centers (“YOM”), a licensed, faith-based pro-life Pregnancy Resource Center (PRC) fighting a coordinated campaign of government intimidation.

YOM has served Massachusetts women for more than 25 years with free ultrasounds, options counseling, and material support, rooted in its Christian conviction that every human life is sacred. Licensed by the Department of Public Health since 1999, it has operated with a spotless record.

Yet Governor Maura Healey, the Department of Public Health, and taxpayer-funded advocacy partner Reproductive Equity Now (“REN”) worked hand-in-glove to brand pro-life centers “deceptive” and “dangerous,” solicit complaints against them, and issue licensing guidance warning doctors and nurses that discussing Abortion Pill Reversal or other life-affirming viewpoints could put their licenses at risk.

The district court dismissed the case, and we appealed to the First Circuit. As our reply brief explains, that ruling cannot stand in light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in NRA v. Vullo, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport, and Chiles v. Salazar.

For example, Vullo drew a clear line: Officials may criticize and persuade, but they violate the Constitution when they use regulatory power to punish or suppress disfavored speech.

In YOM, Massachusetts asks the court to examine each piece of its campaign in isolation – press statements here, licensing guidance there, a complaint-solicitation website – the Supreme Court has rejected that approach. Context matters. And the context here is unmistakable: The Commonwealth branded pro-life centers a public-health threat, issued contemporaneous licensing guidance threatening discipline for the very viewpoint it had just condemned, and then pointed to complaints from its own “trusted partner” – Reproductive Equity Now – as the reason to accelerate the threats.

That partner is no bystander. The Commonwealth’s own materials describe the anti-PRC campaign as having been “created in collaboration with” REN – and internal communications reveal that the targeting of centers like YOM was done on REN’s website specifically because it was “not something we can do on mass.gov.” When government launders viewpoint suppression through a private partner to evade its own constitutional limits, that is state action.

This case is larger than one PRC. It is about whether officials may weaponize licensing authority to silence pro-life, faith-driven speech by relabeling it “misinformation” or a matter of “standard of care.” But as the Supreme Court stated earlier this year in Chiles v. Salazar, “The First Amendment is no word game.” The government cannot escape scrutiny by dressing viewpoint discrimination in the language of medical regulation.

YOM’s physicians, staff, and the advocates who serve women must be free to speak the truth about life-affirming alternatives without fear that the state will turn its licensing power against them.

The ACLJ will continue to stand with Your Options Medical Centers and with every Pregnancy Resource Center facing this kind of coordinated pressure. The record is clear: This was not persuasion – it was coercion. We hope the First Circuit will see it that way.

Stay tuned.

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