CV NEWS FEED // The Sisters of Life won a lawsuit against the State of New York in November, which effectively prevented the government from targeting and accessing private information from pregnancy resource ministries that do not offer abortions.
The Daily Signal on December 4 published an interview with vicar general of the Sisters of Life Sister Maris Stella discussing the importance of the victory. The interview also featured Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the non-profit law firm that represented the Sisters.
The Sisters of Life, based in New York, were founded in 1991 and offer pro-life counseling, housing and support for pregnant women in crisis.
New York passed a law in 2022 that authorized the New York Commissioner of Health to demand private information from pregnancy centers that do not offer abortion services.
Represented by the Becket Fund, the Sisters of Life “asked a federal court for an order protecting them from such government intrusion. The State of New York agreed to a court order, which was granted today, that forbids them from demanding the Sisters’ information or punishing the Sisters for refusing to provide it,” according to a November 8 press release.
“We’re serving pregnant women who are vulnerable and in difficult situations,” Stella told the Daily Signal, describing the importance of the legal victory. “It’s so important that they feel safe. We have very sacred conversations with them. And we come to know their history, their hopes, their fears, their dreams. These are very confidential conversations.”
She explained that the Sisters want to preserve the women’s integrity and privacy, and that trust and care are foundational elements of their mission. “We want women to be able to move in freedom and not in fear. So much of our work is providing a safe space so that she can be free to choose life for herself and for her children,” Stella said.
Rienzi explained that the 2022 NY law was concerning from the beginning, and that “the government never should have tried to do that. We filed a lawsuit against it as soon as they did.”
“In response to the Dobbs decision, some folks in the New York government thought that the best thing to do was to attack pro-lifers and women who wanted help keeping their babies. So they said the Department of Health needs to study these people who don’t provide abortions,” he said:
Part of the study is that they can demand to see all your documents and information, about how do you train people, and who were the women who come to see you, and what is the demographic information, and so forth.
So it’s a lot of just intrusive information, with the government picking out its political opponents and saying “I’d like to go through all of your papers and look for trouble.” And of course, we live in a country with the First Amendment. We live in a country with the Fourth Amendment. The government is not just allowed to come and go through all your papers because they disagree with your politics about something.
Rienzi explained that although the court order technically only applies to the Sisters because they were the only group that sued,
In reality, the state of New York has admitted that it doesn’t need this information. So I think they’d be pretty hard-pressed to try to go enforce this law against somebody else. If that happened to somebody else, [they] could just point to our case and say obviously, the state knows that it doesn’t need these documents. And obviously the state knows that it would be violating the Constitution to insist on it. So I suspect that it just means the state’s gonna back down from everybody.
The Becket Fund represents “people of all faiths, but we’re particularly on the lookout when the government is aggressively hostile to somebody and the government is trying to interfere with somebody’s religious order. And of course, the Sisters of Life are a religious group and a religious order,” Rienzi explained:
It’s particularly bad when the government says we’re going to come into your convent and we’re going to go through your papers and look at everything you’re doing. The government has no ability to do that.
When the government does things like that, it makes us all poorer [and] makes our whole society weaker and worse. It’s just really important for people to stand up and hold the line and keep the government in its right place…
The world is a much better place with the Sisters of Life able to freely and fully help people and live their faith out freely and fearlessly.
