As Trump stokes the fears of his evangelical supporters, and Pence placates the most hardened elements of the far right, a new case is likely to presage the next front in the battle over religious liberty and free speech.
Kelsey knew something was wrong when the woman who had just administered her pregnancy test began to pray over her. Minutes earlier, the college sophomore had walked into the Pregnancy Resource Clinic in State College, Pennsylvania, just half a mile outside the Penn State campus. She’d been greeted by a friendly, solicitous staff, but had been unnerved by their refusal to even mention abortion as an option. When her test came back negative and the administrator began an invocation for her abstinence, however, her stomach sank. “I left feeling deceived and ashamed,” said Kelsey, who asked that I not publish her last name. “Every girl who’s been in that situation would immediately think to go to the Pregnancy Resource Clinic. How would we know that we were being deceived?”
A lawsuit over that very question, which now stands before the Supreme Court, is the latest chess move in the culture wars that have come to define Donald Trump’s presidency. One of the petitioners in the case, State College Pregnancy Resource Clinic, is an affiliate of Care Net, one of the two major Christian organizations that foster a national network of crisis pregnancy centers, or C.P.C.s. Though their outward appearance is disconcertingly similar, unlike health clinics connected to Planned Parenthood, crisis pregnancy centers are designed with the express purpose of dissuading women from getting abortions, and may not even employ licensed medical professionals.
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