San Francisco’s “Prop O” aims to destroy crisis pregnancy centers

In a June 18th press conference at San Francisco’s Planned Parenthood, Mayor London Breed announced yet another pro-abortion measure designed to expand the City’s abortion services. Proposition O would also restrict and regulate any threat to the lucrative abortion industry from the City’s two pro-life crisis pregnancy centers.

Claiming that the counselors at the pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in San Francisco are telling women that “they will go to hell if they get an abortion,” Breed—a graduate of the University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit school—has promised to force the pro-life pregnancy centers to provide visitors with referrals to abortion providers in the City.

Promoting the San Francisco Reproductive Freedom Act at the press conference, Mayor Breed and the progressive members of the City’s Board of Supervisors brought Proposition O to the voters. It is an attempt to “strengthen access to abortion and reproductive services” by destroying the pro-life competition through onerous regulations and restrictions on crisis pregnancy centers. San Francisco voters will vote on the Reproductive Freedom Act next month through Proposition O.

By requiring “signage in front of limited services pregnancy centers that do not provide”—that is, crisis pregnancy centers—and forcing them to provide information on abortion providers in the City, Mayor Breed is encouraging voters to require the City to violate the constitutional rights of those working at the crisis pregnancy centers.

Ignoring the fact that these pro-life crisis pregnancy centers typically offer women supportive alternatives to abortion by providing counseling and ultrasounds, as well as free diapers and items including cribs, highchairs, car seats, and clothing, Mayor Breed has promoted legislation intended to put the crisis pregnancy centers out of business.

Many, if not most, San Francisco voters do not know that these crisis pregnancy centers provide a valuable alternative for women facing a decision about whether to continue their pregnancies. But that, of course, is part of Breed’s strategy. Describing the crisis centers as a draconian site of horrors where women are deceived, Breed attempts to sway voters by creating a nightmare vision of the crisis pregnancy centers as a place where women are verbally abused and bereft of physical care.

Both Breed and the text of Proposition O fail to mention that this latest attack on the crisis pregnancy centers may well be a costly one for taxpayers. While the Office of the Controller estimates a modest cost of $8000.00 to implement the Proposition, the City’s attempt to regulate the speech of those working at the pro-life centers will surely face constitutional problems and legal challenges, which could prove costly. San Francisco taxpayers may well be faced with the burden of defending a losing cause in the courts.

California legislators have been unable to regulate crisis pregnancy centers since 2018 when the United States Supreme Court struck down a state law known as the FACT Act (Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act) that required reproductive health centers to notify clients about abortion and birth control options. The FACT Act also required the centers to tell clients that they were not medical facilities.

In a 5-4 vote, the kustices agreed that California’s use of a “government drafted script” violated the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: “By requiring petitioners to inform women how they can obtain state-subsidized abortions—at the same time petitioners try to dissuade women from choosing that option—the licensed notice plainly ‘alters the content’ of the petitioner’s speech.”

Mayor Breed is trying to avoid violating the Supreme Court directive by claiming she will post the warning signs on City property outside the crisis pregnancy centers. The signs will alert women who consider entering the crisis pregnancy centers that they will not be able to obtain “comprehensive reproductive care” in that facility. The signs will also provide information about the location of abortion facilities in the City.

Breed and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors have long done the bidding of the City’s abortion providers by attempting to destroy any threats to their profitable abortion services. Holding her press conference at Planned Parenthood to announce the roll-out of the Reproductive Freedom Act was a move calculated to show her most progressive and generous donors and campaign supporters that she will do everything in her power to enable the abortion industry to flourish. She knows that if a woman is given supportive counseling, material support, and an ultrasound at a crisis pregnancy center, she will be less likely to abort her child—and San Francisco’s abortion providers would lose yet another paying client in the competitive business of abortion.

Mayor Breed must know that the abortion industry has always been motivated by greed. For more than a century, abortion in San Francisco has created tremendous wealth for abortion providers and the politicians who support them. Breed joins a long line of San Francisco politicians who have benefited handsomely by paving the way for abortion providers in the City. One of the most notorious and prosperous abortionists in the country was San Francisco’s own Inez Burns, who lived in a mansion in San Francisco’s Mission District in the early 1900s. A real estate speculator, as well as an abortionist, Burns is said to have terminated 50,000 pregnancies during her long and lucrative career at a time when doing so should have landed her in prison.

But San Francisco’s local law enforcement took kickbacks and turned a blind eye as she and her staff operated on up to twenty women a day. In the recent book, The Audacity Of Inez Burns: Dreams, Desire, Treachery & Ruin in the City of Gold, Stephen G. Bloom claims that patients ranging from housewives to celebrities, like film star and Olympic skater Sonja Henie, came to Burns for help. Her enormous fortune bought her “friends in high places, including politicians and lawmakers.”

But Inez Burns met her match with the City’s Catholic district attorney Pat Brown, who ordered three raids on her clinic in 1945. “The first two times, Burns was tipped off” by lawmakers and law enforcement who had profited for years from her largesse. “The third time, she was arrested.” The politicians could no longer help her. Burns spent her final years in prison and her abortion empire crumbled.

While there is not another Catholic district attorney like Pat Brown in San Francisco to help stop Breed’s attempt to destroy the crisis pregnancy centers, she has met some resistance from the City’s pro-life religious leaders. San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has attempted to educate voters on the valuable services offered by the City’s crisis pregnancy centers and has encouraged them to vote “No” on Proposition O.