(LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life pregnancy centers in Delaware are declaring victory after the state agreed to drop enforcement of a law infringing on their free speech with mandatory disclaimers encouraging women in need to turn away from them.
Signed in 2024 and taking effect in early 2025, Senate Bill 300 (152nd General Assembly) required so-called “limited services medical facilit[ies]” to “disseminate to a client on site, and in print or digital advertising materials including Internet websites, the following notice: ‘This facility is not licensed as a medical facility by the state of Delaware and has no licensed medical provider who provides or directly supervises the provision of services.’”
In February 2025, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of National Institute of Family & Life Advocates (NIFLA) and A Door of Hope Pregnancy Center, maintaining that the law compels speech in violation of the First Amendment, and does so for a message designed to delegitimize the help that pregnancy centers offer regardless of the message’s accuracy. Door of Hope, for instance, does in fact boast a volunteer medical doctor, volunteer radiologist, and multiple registered nurses, but would be required to state it “has no licensed medical provider.”
“It is a classic example of compelled speech in violation of the Free Speech Clause,” the lawsuit argued. “The law is expressly content-based both because it compels the content of speech and because it regulates only speakers who wish to discuss the subject of pregnancy from a pro-life perspective rather than any other health topic.”
“Delaware’s law explicitly targets pro-life pregnancy centers like A Door of Hope, impeding our ability to continue serving women and men who are making decisions about pregnancies in a spirit of concern and compassion,” Door of Hope executive director Rachel Metzger added. “Our mission is to empower women to make life-affirming and healthy decisions, particularly about sex, pregnancy, and relationships. It’s unlawful for the state to punish us for holding a pro-life viewpoint.”
On June 26, ADF announced that the state has agreed to a court order permanently barring it from enforcing SB 300 against pregnancy centers. The Delaware attorney general’s office has also agreed to pay $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs to settle the case.
“Clearly, state officials shouldn’t enforce unconstitutional laws, and that’s no less true in this case,” said attorney William Thetford of the law firm Simms Showers, which also represented the plaintiffs. “Pregnancy centers are a force for good in Wilmington and the surrounding community, offering families true, life-affirming care and resources during unplanned or unsupported pregnancies, and now they can pursue that worthy mission unshackled by an inappropriate application of the law.”
Pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
The abortion lobby is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers, to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors, to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
