Emily Orshinsky | Right to Refrain: Do Abortion Providers Have a First Amendment Right to Free Speech Under Mandatory Narrated Ultrasound Laws?

BACKGROUND

The First Amendment prohibits Congress or any other legislative body from enacting laws that abridge freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has distinguished between legislation that regulates the content of speech and legislation that regulates conduct associated with the speech. Content-based speech restrictions are generally presumed to be invalid and must face strict scrutiny before the courts. This requires the government to prove that the law is necessary to achieve a compelling state interest — a very high bar that often results in most content-based speech restrictions failing.

The First Amendment not only guarantees the right to speech, it also guarantees the right to refrain from speech. In Riley v. Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind (1988), the Supreme Court held that regulations that compel speech are inherently content-based restrictions, as they compel the speaker to speak when they would have otherwise remained silent. As such, regulations that compel speech must also generally face some form of strict or heightened scrutiny before the court.

In conjunction with the recent rise in abortion regulation, multiple states have passed legislation mandating that narrated ultrasounds be performed by physicians prior to abortion procedures. While specifics vary slightly between states, the laws have the same general premise: physicians are required to perform an ultrasound, display the sonogram, and describe the fetus to the patient. Under these laws, the physician must display and describe the ultrasound, even if the patient actively protests. Most states provide an exception only for emergency situations, although exceptions also vary by state. If a physician refuses to perform the ultrasound, he or she may be subject to multiple forms of punishment, including fines, referral to the state medical licensing board, and an inability to perform future abortions.

THE ISSUE

Reproductive rights and other activist groups have recently joined forces to approach these regulations from a non-traditional vantage point. The groups are straying from the traditional approach of invalidating abortion legislation under Roe v. Wade (1973), where the Supreme Court found a Constitutional right to an abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, the groups have turned their focus to the impact of these regulations on the physicians they are intended to regulate. These activist groups have argued that the mandatory narration laws are unconstitutional not because they prohibit access to abortion, but because they compel physicians to engage in speech from which they otherwise would refrain. This has ultimately led to a single question: what are abortion providers’ First Amendment rights under mandatory narrated ultrasound laws?

THE SPLIT

In Stuart v. Camnitz (2014), the Fourth Circuit held that North Carolina’s narrated ultrasound law violated physicians’ First Amendment right to refrain from speaking “beyond the extent permitted for reasonable regulation of the medical profession.” The Court noted that while “professionals may be subject to regulations by the state that restrict their First Amendment freedoms when acting in the course of their professions, professionals do not leave their speech rights at the office door.” The Court held that this regulation of speech and professional conduct warranted heightened intermediate scrutiny, under which the law failed. The Fourth Circuit stated that “while it is true that the words the state puts into the doctor’s mouth are factual, that does not divorce the speech from its moral or ideological implications,” emphasizing the fact that context matters. Because the speech that the state was attempting to compel in this case was so heavily content-specific and did not allow any room for physicians to exercise professional judgment, the Court held that the law unconstitutionally attempted to make physicians the “mouthpiece of the state” to promote their own “clear and conceded” pro-life position.

The Sixth Circuit recently reached the exact opposite conclusion in EMW Women’s Surgical Center P.S.C. v. Beshear (2019). The Court found that Kentucky’s mandatory narrated ultrasound law did not violate physicians’ First Amendment rights, noting that the law simply “requires the disclosure of truthful, non-misleading, and relevant information about an abortion.” Directly addressing the Fourth Circuit’s 2014 decision, the Court stated that “Stuart’s basis for applying heightened scrutiny is called into question by Supreme Court precedent.” The Court argued that the appropriate level of scrutiny was much lower than that called for by the Fourth Circuit and that, under this new lower level of scrutiny, the law survived. Further opposing the argument that the narrated ultrasound laws inappropriately interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, the Court found that the laws did not interfere “any more than other informed-consent laws,” despite the fact that they were regulating the controversial subject of abortion. Countering the Fourth Circuit’s opinion that the compelling of physicians to deliver the state’s message was unconstitutional, the Sixth Circuit held that “as a First Amendment matter, there is nothing suspect with a State’s requiring a doctor, before performing an abortion, to make truthful, non-misleading factual disclosures, relevant to informed consent, even if those disclosures relate to unborn life and have the effect of persuading the patient not to have an abortion.”

LOOKING FORWARD

The future of this issue remains uncertain. The Court recently made headlines for accepting an admitting privileges case out of the Fifth Circuit, the first abortion-related case since the addition of conservative Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. However, the Court has generally been hesitant to accept abortion-related cases and has already denied a previous appeal for this issue. In 2014, the Court denied North Carolina officials’ petition to appeal the Fourth Circuit’s decision. As of September 26, 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a petition for a writ of certiorari for the Supreme Court to hear its appeal from the Sixth Circuit’s decision. A response is due from the Secretary of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, Adam Meier, by the end of October before the Court will begin to consider the petition. 

For further reading, see: Sex, Lies, and Ultrasound (2018) by Case Western University School of Law Associate Dean and Professor B. Jessie Hill and Professional Rights Speech (2016) by William & Mary Law School Professor Timothy Zick.