California AG makes 'false and misleading' claims to shut down 'abortion pill reversal,' suit argues

The Empire State and the Golden State tend to follow similar public policy paths, and pro-life pregnancy centers in California hope they also share legal defeats in First Amendment lawsuits against the blue states' censorship of advocacy for so-called abortion pill reversal (APR).

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates is seeking a rematch against the California Attorney General's Office, this time Rob Bonta instead of his predecessor Xavier Becerra, now the U.S. secretary of health and human services, whom NIFLA defeated at the Supreme Court in 2018 in another free-speech case.

NIFLA and its California member SCV Pregnancy Resource Center sued Bonta to stop his "credible threat of prosecution" if they promote supplemental progesterone, a natural pregnancy hormone, to reverse the effects of mifepristone, the first of the two-drug abortion drug protocol.

Bonta sued other pregnancy centers for the same advocacy a year ago, arguing that calling the treatment "reversal" is false and misleading because it's only a "competition" between progesterone and mifepristone. APR advocates have consistently emphasized the treatment is not foolproof but "can be effective," in Heartbeat International's words.

The same President Trump-nominated judge issued two injunctions against New York AG Letitia James a month apart in separate cases by pro-life pregnancy centers, preventing her from enforcing state consumer fraud laws against them for APR promotion.

U.S. District Judge John Sinatra compared her legal actions to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the first injunction in August, a victory for NIFLA, New York-based centers and their lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). He issued the second last month in favor of centers represented by the Thomas More Society.

While Bonta's suit claims "not a single credibly designed medical study has verified" APR's effectiveness, advocates are fond of pointing to Yale School of Medicine reproductive research Director Harvey Kliman's 2017 New York Times interview, in which he said he'd tell his own daughter to take progesterone to reverse mifepristone because it "makes biological sense."

The new suit by NIFLA and SCV, which seeks protection to tell the public "it may be possible to counteract" mifepristone "within the first three days after taking it," accuses the AG of making his own false and misleading statements.

Bonta repeated Planned Parenthood's claim that mifepristone is "safer than Tylenol" in his lawsuit against Heartbeat International and RealOptions Obria, yet "no scientific evidence" supports this and the sources cited by the abortion giant and Bonta don't actually back their claims, the plaintiffs said.

They pointed to the Food and Drug Administration's "black-box warning" on mifepristone, which cites studies finding 2.9-4.6% of women go the emergency room after taking the drug, 2-7% of them "will need a surgical procedure" because it didn't work correctly, and its failure rate is 7% between nine and 10 weeks' gestation.

Applying chemical-abortion figures from the Guttmacher Institute, which started as a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood, to the FDA's warning on the drug, NIFLA and SCV estimate mifepristone sends "tens of thousands of women" to the ER each year. Much of the suit lays out the evidence for progesterone, accusing Bonta and APR critics of mischaracterizing it.

They asked Magistrate Judge Jean Rosenbluth, who will make a report and recommendations to an as-yet unlisted district judge, to ban officials from enforcing the state's unfair competition and false advertising laws against APR advocacy and declare they are unconstitutional as applied to restrict their speech.

Conservative watchdog Judicial Watch jumped into the abortion-drug issue Wednesday with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against Becerra's department on behalf of former Vice President Mike Pence's Advancing American Freedom Foundation.

The Department of Health and Human Services and FDA each ignored FOIA requests for decades-old communications related to approval of mifepristone among the FDA, a congressional oversight subcommittee, White House and Roussel Uclaf (now Sanofi), which developed the product originally known as RU-486, the suit alleges.

The requests specifically seek communications between the FDA and then-Associate White House Counsel Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court justice. Judicial Watch blames "pressure from pro-abortion activists" for the Clinton administration rushing approval of the drug in 2000.

This summer the Supreme Court refused to reverse FDA decisions to loosen the regulations around access to mifepristone, rejecting legal standing for the pro-life doctors challenging the regulations. They argued it was likely they would have to "complete" abortions to save the lives of women suffering "serious adverse events" from more easily available mifepristone.

ADF is also representing NIFLA against Bonta, and it's the public interest law firm's second First Amendment suit against California in less than a week.

It's also representing satirical website The Babylon Bee against new state laws that ban distribution of "material deceptive" content about candidates, elected officials and elections and require a label on satire (AB 2839), and require social media platforms to remove or label such content when notified by officials or users (AB 2655), turning them into "state snitches," the suit says.

U.S. District Judge John Mendez blocked AB 2839 Tuesday, finding that even "deepfake" parody videos enjoy constitutional protection, in a lawsuit by the creator of an artificial intelligence-generated video of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris shared by X owner Elon Musk. 

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom had said it "should be illegal."

The Bee applied for a temporary restraining order or expedited motion for preliminary injunction against AB 2839 from Judge Fernando Olguin, nominated by President Obama, the day before President George W. Bush nominee Mendez ruled in favor of Christopher Kohls' challenge.

The right-leaning humor site argued the law unconstitutionally restricts political speech, compels it via disclaimers, "classifies by content, viewpoint, and speaker" and "is a historical anomaly" that fails on its face and as applied to the Bee.