California cannot force pro-life pregnancy centers to give their clients contact information for abortion providers, a Riverside County Superior Court judge ruled Monday, Oct. 30.

Judge Gloria Trask issued an injunction preventing the state attorney general from enforcing the Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care and Transparency (FACT) Act, which requires state-licensed reproductive health clinics to inform clients that public programs provide free or low-cost family planning services, including abortions.

To help women learn whether they qualify for those services, clinics also must provide the phone number for the local county social services office.

The Scharpen Foundation sought an injunction against the act, which became state law in 2016. The foundation runs the Go Mobile For Life clinic, which operates in Riverside County and seeks to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies.

Pro-life groups nationwide run so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Critics say the centers use scare tactics and falsehoods to bully women into carrying fetuses to term.

“While California’s new law does not completely protect a woman from being shamed or lied to, it does provide an opportunity for a woman in a crisis pregnancy center to access other options to get the information and support she may need,” the National Women’s Law Center said in a January 2016 news release.

The foundation and its lawyers, with funding from the Murrieta-based Advocates for Faith & Freedom, argued the act violated the foundation’s freedom of speech. Trask agreed.

“This speech is not merely the transmittal of neutral information, such as the calorie count of a food product, or the octane of gasoline purchased at a pump,” Trask wrote in her ruling.

“Here, the state commands clinics to post specific directions for whom to contact to obtain an abortion. It forces the clinic to point the way to the abortion clinic and can leave patients with the belief that they were referred to an abortion provider by that clinic.”

Rather than force clinics to provide information on abortion services, the state can pay for advertisements to convey that information, Trask ruled.

“Compelled speech must be subject to reasonable limitation,” the judge wrote. “This statute compels the clinic to speak words with which it profoundly disagrees when the state has numerous alternative methods of publishing its message.”

Foundation President Scott Scharpen lauded the ruling.

“The whole notion of being compelled to share information with our patients about abortion availability, which is contrary to our mission and purpose, is fundamentally wrong,” Scharpen said in a news release. “Lives will be saved because of this ruling.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said his office will appeal Trask’s ruling.

“The Reproductive FACT Act ensures that women in California receive accurate information about their healthcare options,” Becerra said in a news release. “The California Department of Justice will do everything necessary to protect women’s healthcare rights.”

Similar challenges to the act have been rejected in federal court, Becerra’s office added.