WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of a New Jersey pregnancy center that alleges state officials are persecuting it with a politically-motivated investigation lacking any legitimate basis.
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 comprehensive reproductive health care,” i.e. abortion and other anti-life practices. 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 that 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 he politically opposes. In February 2024, ADF filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to order a federal district court to hear the case.
In its Monday order list, the nation’s highest court announced it has agreed to take the case. Its next term begins in October 2025.
“The First Amendment protects First Choice’s right to freely speak about its beliefs, exercise its faith, associate with like-minded individuals and organizations, and continue to provide its free services in a caring and compassionate environment to people facing unplanned pregnancies,” says ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley. “The lower courts have wrongly held that First Choice is relegated to state court to present its constitutional claims. We are looking forward to presenting our case to the Supreme Court and urging it to hold that First Choice has the same right to federal court as any other civil rights plaintiff.”
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 and has used publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers, attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors, and 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.”
