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Pro-life pregnancy centers have been criticized for attracting clients through false or misleading marketing and, once clients are through the door, for presenting false or misleading-or at least incomplete-information. A common contemporary means of regulating pregnancy centers is through statutes that require pregnancy centers to give notice that their services are not comprehensive. In 2018, in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the Supreme Court held that California's version of such a disclosure statute likely a,mounted to compelled speech impermissible under the First Amendment.
This Note argues that, separate from their constitutional validity, disclosure requirements are not necessarily the panacea that pro-choice advocates want them to be. Early attempts to regulate pregnancy centers relied on existing false a,dvertising and unfair business practices statutes to prohibit pregnancy centers from engaging in misleading marketing that suggested the centers offered services they did not. When those suits were successful, the resulting injunctive relief often resembled contemporary notice regimes-and so is vulnerable to the same critiques. Both regulatory schemes are addressed primarily to pregnancy centers' deceptive marketing practices and do little to remedy the misinformation that awaits women inside pregnancy centers' doors. Furthermore, transparency literature teaches that even as to this narrow goal, disclosure-type regulation may be ineffective: Critiques of the efficacy of mandated disclosure as a regulatory tool generally likely apply with special force in the context of pregnancy centers.
Introduction
"A car dealer, when he's a,dvertising, does not list the things his auto won't do. So why should we say we don't do abortions?"
- Robert J. Pearson, author of How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center1
Robert Pearson founded one of the first pro-life pregnancy centers in the United States and went on to author a manual designed to help others do the same.2 Pregnancy centers are facilities that provide faith-based pro-life counseling and support services to pregnant women, usually free of charge.3 Notably, pregnancy centers do not provide abortion services or referrals to abortion providers, and they often do not provide or refer for contraceptives.4 Pregnancy centers have been criticized for attracting clients through false or misleading marketing and, once clients are through the door, for presenting false or misleading-or at least incomplete-information.5 These tactics mean...