Delaware has agreed not to enforce a law requiring pro-life pregnancy care centers to post a disclaimer about their services while litigation over the measure continues.
The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates and A Door of Hope Pregnancy Center recently sued Delaware over a law known as Senate Bill 300 passed in 2024.
According to a Defendants Status Quo Order issued by U.S. District Judge Richard G. Andrews on Monday, Delaware officials agreed not to enforce SB 300 during the litigation.
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The religious freedom legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom and Simms Showers LLP, which represented the pro-life pregnancy care centers challenging the law, celebrated the news of the agreement.
“We applaud Delaware officials for allowing NIFLA and A Door of Hope to serve women and families free from government punishment as this case moves forward,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kevin Theriot in a statement on Tuesday.
“We’ve seen too many state attorneys general ramp up their efforts to silence, censor, and shut down pregnancy care centers across the country. We are urging the court to follow the Supreme Court’s guidance and respect pregnancy centers’ freedom to continue their life-saving service in their communities.”
Signed into law last September, SB 300 amends the Delaware Code to require pro-life “crisis pregnancy centers” to display a disclaimer at their site and online that “This facility is not licensed as a medical facility by the state of Delaware and has no licensed medical provider who provides or directly supervises the provision of services.”
State Sen. Kyle Evans Gay, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement last year that the proposed legislation was one of multiple ways that he was helping to make Delaware “a beacon of hope in the preservation of our reproductive liberty.”
He added that SB 300 will protect “unsuspecting Delawareans from being fooled” by pro-life pregnancy center that he claimed were using “misinformation and deceptive business practices to discourage people from seeking [abortion] services.”
In February, the month before SB 300 was scheduled to take effect, NIFLA and Door of Hope filed a legal challenge to the measure, arguing that it was “significantly burdening their ability to speak and even forcing them to speak messages at odds with their mission and the truth.”
“The Compelled Statement would severely limit and in some cases actually prevent Plaintiffs’ speech through digital advertising, such as Google ads, due to character limits, drowning out the pregnancy care centers’ free speech,” read the lawsuit, in part.
“The Compelled Statement must be posted merely because A Door of Hope serves pregnant women from a pro-life perspective, and not with any prerequisite that the center has engaged in any improper behavior or has ever suggested that the care women receive is from unlicensed personnel impersonating licensed medical personnel.”
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a California law requiring pro-life pregnancy centers to post a sign referring patients to abortion clinics was unconstitutional.
