Bill on pro-life pregnancy centers clears hurdle
The City Council bill that would require pro-life pregnancy counseling centers in Baltimore to post signs indicating that they don’t provide abortions or birth control passed a first hurdle this week, clearing the judiciary and legislative investigations committee on Monday by a 3-1 vote.
It now goes to the full council for a preliminary vote next week, with a final vote to follow.
Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien has described the proposal as an unconstitutional “harassment” that infringes on the centers’ free speech. Carol Clews, executive director of the Center for Pregnancy Concerns, says it “impugns our integrity.”
Both say the centers in question do not hide their opposition to abortion. Clews has asked whether abortion providers will be required to post signs saying that they don’t refer pregnant women to adoption services or provide assistance to mothers and children after the birth – services offered by her organization, which operates two clinics in the city and one in the county.
The judiciary and legislative investigations committee amended the bill, which was introduced by council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake at the behest of Planned Parenthood, which hopes to make Baltimore the first city in the country with such a law. The committee voted to reduce the fine for not posting a sign from $500 per day to $150, and to require the city health commissioner to notify a center of a complaint and give the center 10 days to comply before facing penalties.
O’Brien remains unsatisfied. In his column in the archdiocesan newspaper The Catholic Review, he urges readers to contact city council members.
"Instead of focusing on the poverty, violence and homelessness that has had a death grip on Baltimore and its citizens for years," he writes, "the City Council has made it a priority to force all four of its pregnancy centers – centers the City’s own Social Services departments refer women to – to post signs that state the services they do not provide, namely abortion and contraception. As introduced, the bill imposes a criminal fine of $500/day for failing to post such a sign. Seemingly benign on its face, the bill unnecessarily targets only pro-life pregnancy resource centers and promises to be a model and jumping-off point for a national effort to attack pregnancy resource centers. What other private, charitable organizations or even public businesses are required to post services that they do not provide? It mirrors similar legislation introduced at the state level in 2008, which failed to pass. In both cases the proposed laws target pregnancy centers because of their pro-life mission and do not require abortion clinics to make similar disclosures.
"What do these pregnancy resource centers do that could possibly explain such unwarranted scrutiny by our City Council? Among the free help they offer are pregnancy tests, sonograms, maternity and baby clothes, confidential counseling and parenting classes. Assisting these centers in their good work are the people of the Gabriel Network, which supplements the invaluable life-affirming resources provided by pregnancy resource centers by connecting women in need with “angel friends.” These volunteers stay with women in crisis throughout their pregnancies and beyond, helping them find housing, taking them to prenatal appointments, assisting them in obtaining scholarships to finish school and helping them find the resources they need for themselves and their children. In fact, I have heard stories of “angel friends” still in contact and friendship with their former clients 10 years later. These pregnancy resource centers and angel friends do the work of the Good Samaritan, the work necessary to building a culture of life, and the work required of us to accompany our commitment as a pro-life Church."
