Welcome to the TMS Weekly Dispatch for September 8, 2025—with the latest news and updates from the front line, to keep you in-the-know on all things Thomas More Society. If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here.    

Here’s a look back at the past week:

NEW FILING IN FEDERAL LAWSUIT AGAINST CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY GENERAL: Thomas More Society attorneys filed a Reply Brief in Culture of Life Family Services v. Bonta on September 3, in our appeal to a district court’s decision to deny COLFS’ request for an injunction against baseless legal attacks on pregnancy centers and Abortion Pill Reversal from California’s pro-abortion Attorney General Rob Bonta.  

Despite attacking pregnancy centers that share about or offer Abortion Pill Reversal, AG Bonta has failed to provide any evidence of his claims that APR is harmful to women and not backed by science.  

“Bonta attempts to decide a scientific debate that he insists does not exist,” states the brief. “But he fails to offer any argument undermining the fact that COLFS’ pro-APR speech “relate[s] to a matter of public concern,” is not “provably false,” and is thus entitled to “full constitutional protection.”

Read the full Reply Brief here.  

THIS 35-YEAR-OLD PRECEDENT MUST GO — TMS FILES BRIEF SUPPORTING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AT SUPREME COURT: TMS attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of petitioners in Miller v. McDonald, a lawsuit brought by three Amish parents challenging New York state’s refusal to allow their children religious exemptions from vaccinations—despite the fact that 46 U.S. states allow for religious exemptions to be made. New York repealed its religious exemption while maintaining its medical exemption.  

But the issue at stake is larger than immunizations and particular exceptions to mandates requiring vaccination, going to the center of the future of religious freedom in America. In the brief, TMS calls on SCOTUS to overrule Employment Division v. Smith (1990) because it “wrongly transformed the Free Exercise Clause into a rule of formal equality,” by sidelining the “special burdens” religious Americans face.

Under the Smith precedent, laws encroaching on religious exercise can be deemed constitutional if “secular and religious actors are subject to the same burdens from the government's perspective”—not from the believer’s perspective, who suffers “special burdens” on account of even generally applicable laws encroaching on religious freedom.  

The brief highlights the tension between Smith and the First Amendment’s intentionally robust protection of religious freedom:

Moreover, Miller confirms the need to overrule Smith, which eliminated the Free Exercise Clause’s promise of substantive equality for religious believers to allow reprieve from special burdens they can suffer from rules that are “generally applicable” only in the most formalistic sense... In reality, restoring the Free Exercise Clause’s liberty rule would paradoxically restore substantive equality for religious believers. During the Prohibition, for example, the government exempted “the sacramental use of wine by the Roman Catholic Church.” Absent an exemption, the general ban on wine would have undoubtedly burdened Catholics’ religious beliefs more than those of non-Catholics.

Read the full brief here. And check out this thread on X about our filing.

NEW JERSEY AG EMBARKS ON “FISHING EXPEDITION” AGAINST PRO-LIFE PREGNANCY CENTERS: On behalf of two leading pro-life pregnancy centers, Heartbeat International and Care Net, TMS is urging the United States Supreme Court to halt the New Jersey AG’s “sweeping subpoena” demanding private communications from pro-life pregnancy centers. “New Jersey’s sweeping subpoena is a fishing expedition that seeks to surveil these pro-life ministries and is part of a pattern to stifle their ability to provide help and hope to women in need,” clarified Peter Breen, TMS Executive VP & Head of Litigation.

Read the full brief here.

RFK JR – BIDEN FDA “TWISTED THE DATA” ON ABORTION PILL: In a Senate hearing last Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stated that his department was actively reviewing data on the chemical abortion pill, saying: “We know that during the Biden administration, they actually twisted the data… we’re going to make sure that that doesn’t happen anymore.”  

Kennedy has promised to prioritize further examination into the abortion pill’s safety as abortion numbers rise across the country, with the pill accounting for 63% of U.S. abortions.  

Proponents of abortion are pushing back and attempting to bury the evidence backing efficacious Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) treatment, a progesterone-based protocol that can help women reverse the effects of the first abortion pill, mifepristone, and save their baby. Pro-abortion politicians like New York Attorney General Letitia James have doubled down in support of the abortion pill—erroneously described as “safer than Tylenol”—while actively targeting pregnancy centers that offer or promote APR, citing “deception” and ‘misinformation.’

Thomas More Society continues the coast-to-coast fight to protect APR and a woman’s right to choose life for her baby. No woman should be forced into completely an abortion she no longer wants.