Pro-lifers warn two Louisiana bills would severely restrict pregnancy centers

HB 611, the Pregnancy Help Center Healthcare Licensing Act, would require any pregnancy center that provides “healthcare services,” including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, medical screening, diagnostic service, and “pregnancy counseling or consultation presented as medical advice,” to be “licensed by the department as a healthcare facility” and subject to standards including “clinical supervision by appropriately licensed medical professionals,” potentially meaning that no facility without a doctor or nurse onsite could offer ultrasounds, despite the fact that the ultrasounds are already performed by fully licensed and qualified technicians.

HB 931, meanwhile, forbids any organization that receives grants from the Louisiana Pregnancy and BabyCare Initiative from “condition[ing] a client’s receipt of any services or products on a requirement that clients attend classes and watch videos that include religious instruction or require attendance at religious services.” As detailed by the Washington Stand, critics fear the bill could be construed to forbid pregnancy centers from merely sharing religious material or praying with women.

“It’s not just a sudden push, it’s a concerted effort that we’ll see replicated nationwide, especially if this passes here in Louisiana,” Erica Inzina of Louisiana Right to Life told Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. “Some of the language and the tactics that we’re seeing are the same types of tactics that have been used in other ways to villainize pregnancy centers elsewhere in the country. We have two very anti-life and anti-pregnancy center legislators who are kind of behind this here in our Louisiana legislature — thank goodness they are not the norm. They are the exception. But … they are working concertedly with more national groups to start chipping away at pregnancy centers.”

No votes have yet been taken on either bill, and HB 611 has been postponed from further consideration for the time being.

Crisis pregnancy centers and other community health locations 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 movement 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.

Louisiana effectively prohibits all abortion except in cases of medical emergencies or “fetal anomaly,” resulting in the state seeing fewer than 10 legal abortions in 2023 and 2024, according to the most recent data. But the interstate mail distribution of abortion drugs undermines pro-life state laws, so Louisiana is currently suing the federal government to challenge the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s permissive abortion pill rules.