There is a troubling pattern emerging of government officials in America’s bluest states punishing religious organizations and individuals for simply living their faith. Whether the target is Catholic nuns or preschools, Christian pregnancy centers or charities, the message is the same: Conform your beliefs to the state’s progressive ideology or prepare for years of investigations, lawsuits, and crippling legal costs.
California is currently offering perhaps the clearest example.
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Today, most abortions in America are chemical abortions. Millions of women take abortion pills at home, most often alone and far from medical supervision. For some women, however, regret sets in after taking the first drug. Before the second drug is taken, doctors may be able to attempt what’s known as abortion pill reversal by administering progesterone. Thousands of children are alive today because their mothers found information about the treatment in time.
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California Attorney General Rob Bonta wants to stop Christian ministries from telling women that help exists.
San Francisco’s Catholic Archbishop, Salvatore Cordilione, and Oakland’s Bishop, Michael Barber, are sounding the alarm in an opinion commentary in the Wall Street Journal. The prelates condemn a lawsuit now being tried in Oakland, California, seeking an injunction and as much as $20 million in penalties against Heartbeat International and RealOptions, two Christian nonprofit organizations that tell women abortion pill reversal is available and connect them with licensed physicians willing to provide care.
The state’s legal theory should alarm Americans regardless of their views on abortion. California argues that because these nonprofits solicit donations, their public statements can be treated as commercial advertising subject to prosecution under consumer protection laws. No woman claims she was harmed. The organizations charge nothing for their services. Nevertheless, the state seeks to impose crushing financial penalties for speech it dislikes.
This is hardly California’s first attempt to silence pro-life ministries. In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down California’s FACT Act in NIFLA v. Becerra, holding that the state could not force pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise government-funded abortion services. Then, California tried compelled speech. Now it is trying punitive litigation. The objective remains the same: Make it increasingly difficult for Christian ministries to serve women while remaining faithful to their convictions.
California is not alone.
In New Jersey, Attorney General Matthew Platkin pursued First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a Christian pro-life pregnancy center, through sweeping administrative subpoenas demanding years of internal documents, donor information, and other records despite offering scant justification for such extraordinary demands. The dispute reached the Supreme Court this past term, where the Court unanimously ruled that federal courts can consider constitutional challenges to administrative subpoenas, particularly when First Amendment rights are at stake.
Colorado has followed a similar path. The Supreme Court has twice rebuked the state for attempting to force Christians to create expression contrary to their beliefs in Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative. Yet, as the Supreme Court will consider this upcoming term in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, Colorado continues to impose progressive ideology by effectively excluding Catholic preschools from its universal preschool program because they refuse to abandon fundamental religious teachings about sex, marriage, and the human person.
The targets keep changing. Pennsylvania spent years trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide coverage for abortifacient drugs despite their Catholic beliefs. New York recently agreed to temporarily halt pressuring four orders of Catholic nuns and Catholic healthcare ministries in its push to promote physician-assisted suicide.
These cases are often presented as isolated disputes involving technical questions of regulatory law. They are nothing of the sort.
Taken together, they reveal a broader strategy by progressive officials of using licensing laws, consumer protection statutes, anti-discrimination rules, subpoena powers, and public funding conditions to compel religious organizations to choose between violating their convictions and enduring years of costly litigation. The religious communities, schools, and faith-inspired nonprofit groups are not asking the government to endorse their beliefs. They are asking only for the freedom to live and serve consistently with them.
That is precisely what the Constitution promises.
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Our country is strongest when people of faith are free to open schools, operate charities, care for the sick, counsel pregnant women, and serve their communities without being forced to surrender the convictions that inspire those ministries. Government officials cross a dangerous line when they wield regulatory power not to protect the public, but to pressure religious believers into abandoning their faith.
Whether the courtroom is in Oakland, Denver, Philadelphia, or Albany, the principle remains the same. This assault is dangerous not because it targets politically disfavored positions, but because it targets convictions rooted in faith and conscience. If those freedoms can be regulated away whenever they conflict with the ideology of the party in power, then the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty becomes little more than words on paper.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project and recipient of the 2025 Religious Freedom Impact award.
