Pro-Life Pregnancy Center Heads to Supreme Court to Stop Pro-Abortion State’s Harassment

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin on December 2, 2025, a case challenging a broad investigative subpoena infringing on the First Amendment rights of a pro-life pregnancy center. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin claims without any evidence that First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a religious nonprofit, provides “false and misleading information” to women and has demanded it hand over advertising materials on the Abortion Pill Reversal (APR) protocol, donor lists, personnel files, and other operational records spanning the last 10 years.

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First Choice, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, asks SCOTUS to resolve a technical but urgent constitutional question of whether a state subpoena that chills First Amendment rights must first be litigated in state court before seeking federal court relief. Initially in January 2024, a federal court ruled that the New Jersey state court had jurisdiction despite the case involving First Amendment violations. Ultimately, the federal courts declined to intervene in 2024 allowing the case to proceed through the state court, which ruled the subpoena was valid, but did not make any ruling on First Choice’s constitutional objections. Now that SCOTUS has granted review of the case, First Choice is asking the High Court to let federal courts hear its First Amendment claims.

The High Court is expected to deliver a ruling in the case by June 2026.

The case may also have significant implications regarding free speech, association, and donor privacy potentially determining when nonprofit plaintiffs can get access to a federal forum when state actions infringe on federal protections. In its High Court petition, First Choice argues that states sometimes target political opponents with their expansive investigatory powers, and AG Platkin’s subpoena improperly targets its pro-life viewpoint, chills donor participation, and imposes an immediate threat to its First Amendment rights to free speech and free association

The subpoena causes donors and associates to “think twice” before speaking and associating with First Choice out of “fear of retaliation” from pro-abortion officials, stated First Choice’s SCOTUS petition.

Since 2022, AG Platkin has vocally expressed his hostility toward pro-life groups calling them “extremists” and issued a statewide “consumer alert” declaring the state’s pro-life pregnancy centers mislead the public about their health care services.

First Choice is a non-profit, faith-based organization operating five pregnancy centers across New Jersey. Founded in 1985 and incorporated as a religious nonprofit in 2007, First Choice provides pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, counseling, parenting classes, and support for women and men facing unplanned pregnancies. It also provides access to APR for pregnant women who have taken the first drug in the two-step abortion drug regimen. It does not perform or refer for abortions and believes its service stems from the conviction that “life begins at conception.”

More information about reversing the abortion pill can be viewed here.

Liberty Counsel has represented other pro-life crisis pregnancy centers and won a permanent injunction in Mountain Right to Life v. Becerra, which now protects three centers in Southern California from government censorship and First Amendment infringement.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The New Jersey Attorney General’s subpoena violates the First Amendment by demanding First Choice Pregnancy Resource Centers break the confidentiality of its donors and associates without any evidence of wrongdoing or any compelling need. Challenges to state investigations where constitutional protections are at issue should not have to wait for state court rulings that may or may not resolve those issues. The government has no business harassing pro-life ministries and its supporters because it disagrees with their pro-life cause.”