New Jersey legislators’ effort to salvage a controversial bill targeting crisis pregnancy centers would make all health care providers subject to the state’s consumer fraud act, from which they’re now exempt.
The bill was intended to crack down on anti-abortion, faith-based pregnancy centers that use what critics call deceptive advertising to lure and persuade vulnerable women not to end their pregnancies.
But after a chain of centers sued to stop a state consumer fraud probe in a case that’s now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the bill’s sponsors this week amended the bill to broaden it to anyone who provides health care services, removing “crisis pregnancy centers” from the legislation altogether.
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The tweaks were meant to head off constitutional challenges by centers whose supporters say such a law would violate their free-speech and religious-freedom rights.
Instead, the changes alarmed the health care community.
Joshua Bengal, general counsel and director of government relations at the Medical Society of New Jersey, noted that the consumer fraud act exempts “learned professionals,” including doctors, nurses, and others in highly regulated professions. Eliminating that exemption would be “very concerning,” he said.
“That is certainly concerning to the Medical Society and to the physician community in New Jersey,” Bengal said. “I would also add that it seems contrary to the original intent of the law, which was to create protections when services that are not actually medical are being offered. The original intent of the law was not to create a Consumer Fraud Act cause of action for what are truly medical services.”
Linda Schwimmer, president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, said the bill’s amendments “do not make sense.”
“It is always a crime to pretend you are a doctor or a nurse and to provide unlicensed medical care. The bill in its original form was going after centers for posing as a medical practice and adding that to the Consumer Fraud Act,” Schwimmer said in an email to the New Jersey Monitor. “The amendments would add health care providers into the orbit of the law, but they ARE health care providers. It then tries to regulate health care providers’ activity under the Consumer Fraud Act, but their activity is regulated and overseen by the licensing boards.”
Bill sponsors Assemblywomen Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (D-Mercer) and Ellen Park (D-Bergen) did not respond to a request for comment.
The amendments were introduced Monday, just minutes before an Assembly panel held a public hearing on the bill in Trenton. That last-minute rewrite led to confusion among both legislators and the centers’ supporters, who packed the room to testify against the bill.
The amendments also replaced “crisis pregnancy center” with “a person” in the bill’s verbiage, with the latest version of the bill prohibiting “a person” from falsely representing themselves as “a health care facility.” Such semantic slaloming only deepened confusion.
“My husband’s an English teacher, and the way the law or the proposed legislation reads now would get an F in his class,” said Joan Fasanello, director of Life Choices, a pregnancy center in Phillipsburg. “It needs to be reworded. You got ‘person’ and ‘thing,’ and they’re switching all over. So it’s confusing.”
Shawn Hyland of the New Jersey Family Policy Center seconded that sentiment.
“Even though you may take out the words ‘crisis pregnancy center’ from the bill and put the word ‘person’ in there, we still know what it is that you’re referring to,” Hyland said.
Eileen Den Bleyker, an attorney for First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, warned lawmakers the bill, as amended, would vastly expand the consumer fraud law “beyond any place it’s ever been.”
“There’s other constituents in the community — doctors, dentists, the American Medical Association — who will be shocked to find out that there’s a bill progressing that will bring them under the Consumer Fraud Act,” Den Bleyker said.
The Democratic majority of the Assembly women’s affairs committee voted to advance the bill, with the panel’s two lone Republicans voting no.
Assemblyman Joe Danielsen (D-Somerset) dismissed concerns that the amended bill is overreaching.
“There are similar statutes that cover veteran services, financial services, housing services, with the exact same wording, and the sky has not fallen down,” he said. “This is a bill that does enough benefit for the protection of women that it should move forward, albeit possibly with some future amendments.”
But Assemblyman Don Guardian (R-Atlantic) warned his colleagues that the Legislature’s legal staff last year found that the bill likely wouldn’t survive a court challenge, especially since a federal judge in 2023 blocked a similar bill in Illinois over First Amendment concerns.
“If we pass this bill, the governor signs this bill, the Senate approves this bill, it’s most likely going to be overturned because it’s unconstitutional,” Guardian said.
The Senate version of the bill awaits a hearing before that chamber’s commerce committee.
The legislation was first introduced in 2021 and gained some traction after the state Attorney General’s Office issued a 2022 consumer alert telling New Jersey residents that crisis pregnancy centers hide their antiabortion mission and masquerade as medical professionals.
On Monday, Assemblywoman Mitchelle Drulis (D-Hunterdon) held up a page printed from a center in her district that pictures a medical professional in scrubs with a stethoscope and includes verbiage about medical procedures including ultrasounds. Such messaging could mislead readers that the center is a medical facility, she said.
Besides the consumer alert, the attorney general’s office also launched an investigation into the centers, claiming deceptive advertising. But First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, which has five locations in New Jersey, sued to stop the probe after receiving subpoenas for donor records. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in that case in December, and a decision is expected by the summer.
Michael Symons, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment.
New Jersey has more than 50 such centers around the state, according to New Jersey Right to Life.
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