WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas struck a potentially fatal blow to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office’s case defending its investigation of a pro-life pregnancy center, by getting an attorney to admit it had received no actual complaints about the center.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, New Jersey Democrat Attorney General Matt Platkin issued a consumer alert in 2022 branding pro-life crisis pregnancy centers as “seek(ing) to prevent people from accessing [so-called] comprehensive reproductive health care”; it was later revealed that his office collaborated with America’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, on the final draft of the alert.
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers sued Platkin over its efforts to force the nonprofit to “produce extensive documentation” without reasonable cause and under threat of punishment for “possible violations of ‘the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act’” in its promotion of Abortion Pill Reversal, a safe method of counteracting abortion pills by administering extra progesterone, the natural hormone mifepristone blocks, which has a success rate over 60 percent.
“Platkin selectively targeted First Choice Women’s Resource Centers based on its religious speech and pro-life views,” declared Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) at the time, noting that he “does not refer to any substantive evidence of wrongdoing to justify his onerous demands” but rather embarked on a fishing expedition in hopes of finding damaging material on an entity that he politically opposes. In February 2024, ADF filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to order a federal district court to hear the case.
The nation’s highest court agreed to hear the case, with the normally reserved Thomas cutting to the heart of the matter with his cross-examination.
Justice Thomas forces the New Jersey AG’s chief counsel to admit the state issued a subpoena for a pro-life pregnancy center’s donors without receiving a single complaint about the organization.
“So you had no basis to think that they were deceiving any of their contributors?”… pic.twitter.com/oN5TAt1RPm
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) December 2, 2025
“You had no basis to think that they were deceiving any of their contributors?” Thomas asked AG’s Office attorney Sundeep Iyer.
“We certainly had complaints about crisis pregnancy centers,” Iyer said, before admitting that, regarding First Choice specifically, “we had no complaints.”
Iyer attempted to justify the state’s investigation on the ground that state and federal governments “initiate investigations all the time in the absence of complaints where they have a reason to suspect that there could be potential issues of legal compliance,” insisting they had “more than ample basis” in this case to explore supposed concerns about privacy violations, misleading donors and patients, and unlicensed medical practices.
“Well, that just seems a burdensome way to find out whether someone has a confusing website,” Thomas replied, indicating he found the answer less than persuasive.
The New York Post reports that Chief Justice John Roberts pressed Iyer on whether it “might have an effect on future potential donors to the organization to know that their name, phone number, address, etc, could be disclosed as a result of the subpoena?” Iyer dismissed the concern by belittling a First Choice donor’s attestation they would have been less likely to donate knowing that as a “backwards-looking statement.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch was incredulous at the defense, asking, “really? I mean, we’re going to now pick over the tense of the verb that they chose?” Even left-wing Justice Elena Kagan agreed that an “ordinary person, one of the funders for this organization or for any similar organization, presented with the subpoena and then told, ‘But don’t worry, it has to be stamped by a court,’ is not going to take that as very reassuring.”
“If you look at the allegations in this case, some donors gave as little as $10,” argued ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, who represented First Choice. “Those folks are going to be worried about a state attorney general getting their names, phone numbers, addresses, places of employment, so that he can contact them about a donor website.”
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
The abortion movement is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers, to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors, to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
Meanwhile, New Jersey Republicans have introduced articles of impeachment against Platkin for among other things “target(ing) pro-life pregnancy centers due to the organization’s religious speech and pro-life views by issuing an overbroad subpoena to one of these centers.”
The Post reports that a ruling is expected in June.
