Pro-life center in federal court after Massachusetts launches unfounded attack

A pro-life pregnancy center in Massachusetts has spent more than two years watching a government-funded campaign work to put it out of business. Now its legal fight is heading to a federal appeals court.

Key Takeaways:

• The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) is appealing on behalf of a Massachusetts pro-life pregnancy center targeted by a state-funded smear campaign launched after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

• State officials partnered with a pro-abortion advocacy group to brand pro-life centers as “dangerous” and “deceptive,” directing taxpayer dollars toward a campaign that specifically named the center by name and linked its clinic location on official government webpages.

• Internal government documents obtained during the case reveal officials explicitly discussed how to address the religious character of pro-life centers.

• The ACLJ is pursuing a “multipronged legal campaign” including FOIA requests, a federal lawsuit, and a public counter-campaign to defend pregnancy resource centers nationwide.

The Details:

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) filed its opening brief this week in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on behalf of Your Options Medical Centers (YOM), a faith-based pregnancy resource center that has operated in Massachusetts for over 25 years without a single patient complaint.

For a quarter century, YOM has served women facing unplanned pregnancies with free ultrasounds, counseling, and practical help. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022, that was apparently enough to make it a target.

Before long, Massachusetts had channeled more than one million in taxpayer dollars into a campaign branding pro-life pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) as both “fake clinics” and a “public health threat.” 

Rather than act through its own agencies alone, the state also recruited Reproductive Equity Now, a pro-abortion organization, to work alongside officials in gathering complaints and applying pressure to centers like YOM. The center found itself named on official government webpages, its Revere clinic photographed and displayed for public identification.

The real-world consequences followed quickly. 

Zoom In:

One physician resigned after concluding that the professional risk was no longer worth it, and women who might otherwise have sought life-affirming care began going elsewhere. Meanwhile, the state’s own campaign partner filed a complaint against the center’s medical director with the Board of Registration in Medicine. That investigation has now stretched past the two-year mark, and has yet to produce a single finding against her.

What the ACLJ wants a federal court to see is not just a hostile campaign, but a selective one.

Internal government planning documents raise the question directly: officials asked, in writing, how they wanted to address the “religious” dimensions of pro-life centers. That language, the ACLJ argues, is evidence of targeted hostility toward a specific religious viewpoint dressed up as public health enforcement.

The lower court looked at the state’s actions piece by piece and found no constitutional violation, but the ACLJ argues that approach missed the point entirely. Viewed as a whole, the coordinated campaign including the funding, the partnership, the regulatory pressure, and the investigation paints a picture “the First and Fourteenth Amendments” were designed to address.

Alongside the federal appeal, the organization is pursuing FOIA requests and a public counter-campaign it hopes will expose the broader pattern of government-assisted pressure on pregnancy resource centers across the country.

The Bottom Line:

Pregnancy resource centers exist to give women something the abortion industry would rather they never find, which is simply a reason to choose differently. That said, what happened in Massachusetts was not oversight; it was a coordinated attempt to make the truth harder to reach, funded by the public and executed through the machinery of state regulation.

The First Circuit will now decide whether that distinction matters under the Constitution.