Bonta's office is asking the court to impose roughly $19.86 million in penalties against Heartbeat International and up to $640,000 against RealOptions. The state's theory, built on California's False Advertising Law and Unfair Competition Law, is that the groups violated the law each time they advertised Abortion Pill Reversal, or APR, as "safe and effective." Bonta's attorneys have asked for a fine of $2,500 per infraction, calling the treatment "unproven and largely experimental."
Abortion Pill Reversal is a protocol in which a woman who has taken the first of two drugs in a chemical abortion regimen — mifepristone — is given high doses of progesterone in hopes of counteracting the drug before the second pill ends the pregnancy. Doctors who administer it report that a meaningful share of women who follow through complete their pregnancies. Heartbeat International, based in Columbus, Ohio, has argued in court filings that the First Amendment protects both its own speech and a woman's right to hear about every option available to her after taking an abortion pill, not only the option the state prefers she hear.
The trial, heard by a judge rather than a jury, is expected to run three to four weeks. It marks the first time a case over Abortion Pill Reversal advertising has gone before a court anywhere in the country, and pro-life legal groups are watching closely because a ruling against Heartbeat International would put pregnancy centers nationwide on notice that describing this option to clients could carry a price tag in the tens of millions of dollars.
Set that dollar figure down for a moment and look at what the state is actually asking a judge to punish. Not a woman being harmed. Not a false claim about anyone's safety. A pregnancy center telling a frightened young woman that the door she thought was closed might not be closed after all.
A word that reverses more than a pill
My friend, there is something almost too fitting about the name of this treatment. Abortion Pill Reversal. Because that is the whole story of the gospel in three words — a thing set in motion toward death, turned back toward life. That is not a scientific novelty. That is what God has been doing since Adam hid in the garden.
Every mother who takes that first pill and then regrets it in the same hour is living out something you and I know in our own bones: we make choices in fear or in haste that we would give anything to undo. The world tells her the door is shut, the deed is done, there is no going back. The state of California, of all things, wants to fine the very people willing to tell her otherwise. But hear this, and hear it plain: the God of the Bible is in the reversal business. He has been reversing the curse since the day He promised a Savior to Eve. He does not deal in "too late."
"Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." (Isaiah 1:18)
Scarlet. Crimson. The color of blood, the color of a decision already made. And still God says it can be made white as snow. If that is true of sin — and it is, my friend, it is — then no woman standing in a clinic parking lot with a pill bottle in her purse and tears on her face is beyond the reach of hope. She has not gone further than grace can follow.
That is what these pregnancy centers are trying to hand her: not a guarantee, but a chance, and the truth that the chance exists. A government can pass a law. A government can fine an organization into the ground. But no court in Oakland or anywhere else can legislate away the fact that God restores what looks unrestorable. He did it for a woman at a well in Samaria. He did it for a thief on a cross. He can do it for a scared young mother who thought she had already decided her baby's fate.
The truth does not need permission from the state to be spoken, and it will not stop being true because a fine is attached to it. Tell the frightened woman there is still a door. Tell her the God who made her the child within her has not run out of mercy. That is the whole of it — and it is enough.