Supreme Court Rebukes Democrat AG for Threatening Pro-Life Pregnancy Center

The Supreme Court delivered a unanimous rebuke to New Jersey Democrat Attorney General Matthew Platkin for his demand that a pro-life pregnancy center hand over its donor information.

Platkin had issued a subpoena to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, seeking to prove that the pregnancy center was misleading donors.

The Supreme Court cited NAACP v. Alabama (1958), which secured the precedent that donors have a First Amendment right to contribute to causes anonymously.

“Since the 1950s, this court has confronted one official demand after another like the Attorney General’s,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the unanimous opinion. “Over and again, we have held those demands burden the exercise of First Amendment rights. Disputing none of these precedents but seeking ways around them, the attorney general has offered a variety of arguments. Some are old, some are new, but none succeeds.”

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In response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade (1973) in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Platkin established a “Reproductive Rights Strike Force.” That strike force issued a “consumer alert” accusing pro-life pregnancy centers of “seek[ing] to prevent people from accessing comprehensive reproductive health care” by “provid[ing] false or misleading information about abortion.”

Pro-life pregnancy centers like First Choice offer various services to women facing crisis pregnancies, such as counseling, food, shelter, clothing, and baby items in an attempt to convince them not to undergo abortions and to prepare them to take care of their babies. These centers compete with abortion centers, and Democrats have suggested that they engage in misleading advertising to do so.

Platkin’s office had not received any complaints from the public about First Choice, but staff served a subpoena on the pregnancy center in 2023, regardless. The subpoena mentioned the state’s Consumer Fraud Act and commanded First Choice to produce documents within 30 days, demanding the names, phone numbers, addresses, and places of employment of all individuals who contributed to the pregnancy center by specific means. The attorney general later claimed his office intended to contact donors to determine if they had “been misled” by First Choice.

Gorsuch noted that Platkin’s apparent theory involved the idea that First Choice had misled donors into thinking that it provides abortions.

First Choice sued, seeking an injunction to block the subpoena. Both the district court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit dismissed First Choice’s claim. As Gorsuch explained, the case centers on whether the threat of Platkin taking further action against First Choice qualified as an “injury-in-fact,” giving the pregnancy center standing to sue in court. First Choice could sue to prevent enforcement of the subpoena so long as it faces “a credible threat of enforcement.”

Gorsuch agreed with First Choice’s claim that “the attorney general’s subpoena itself—and specifically its demand for donor information—has caused it to suffer an actual and ongoing injury to its First Amendment rights by deterring donors from associating with it.”

This case follows a recent trend of Democrat attorneys general seeking donor information in a way that contradicts the Supreme Court’s ruling in NAACP v. Alabama. In 2021, the Supreme Court upheldopens in a new tab the rights of Americans for Prosperity against California Democrat Attorney General Rob Bonta.

LifeNews Note:Tyler O’Neil writes for Daily Signal, where this article originally appeared.

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