Supreme Court rules anti-abortion group can challenge N.J. subpoena in federal court

In a unanimous decision with implications for state enforcement, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a faith-based anti-abortion group may challenge a subpoena from New Jersey’s attorney general in federal court. 

New Jersey had issued a subpoena to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers seeking its donor list amid an investigation into whether the group was “misleading donors and potential clients regarding the health services they provide.” Instead, the group, worried the subpoena could cause contributors to walk away, challenged the subpoena in court. 

A lower federal court had determined that First Choice had not yet suffered harm as a result of the subpoena, and thus ruled the challenge lacked standing in federal court. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, unanimously determined that the subpoena could pose a threat to the group’s First Amendment rights, and thus had standing to challenge it in federal court. 

“Since the 1950s, this Court has confronted one official demand after another like the Attorney General’s,” Gorsuch wrote. “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.”

The ruling does not automatically squash the subpoena; rather, First Choice now has standing to challenge the subpoena in a lower federal court, where the case will return. But it will return to the lower court with the weight of a unanimous ruling that such subpoenas can violate a group’s First Amendment rights.

“A government that takes three limbs but spares the last imposes an injury all the same,” Gorsuch wrote.

The case — titled First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport — bears the name of Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, but was argued in December, when former Attorney General Matt Platkin still held the office. The Supreme Court announced it would hear the case in June. 

A number of religious, anti-abortion, and internet groups filed briefs in support of First Choice. NetChoice, an association of tech companies like Netflix, TikTok, and Meta, argued that such subpoenas are often “designed to chill” an organization’s First Amendment rights. Many of NetChoice’s tech companies have been subject to similar attorney general investigations from across the country.

The subpoena included a demand for a list of donors who gave money through a couple of websites associated with the anti-abortion group. The state argues the websites may have illegally misled potential clients and donors about the ultimate aims of the group, and said identifying donors is a key step in furthering the investigation.

“First Choice—a crisis pregnancy center operating in New Jersey—has for years refused to answer questions about their operations in New Jersey and the potential misrepresentations they have been making, including about reproductive healthcare,” former Attorney General Platkin said last year. “We issued a lawful subpoena in November 2023 to ensure that First Choice was complying with all relevant state laws.”

But anti-abortion groups — which accuse Democratic-led states of targeting pregnancy centers that often try to persuade patients out of getting an abortion — celebrated Wednesday’s ruling.

“Even the Court’s left-leaning justices recognized the far-reaching chill AG Platkin’s weaponization of government would have on all Americans’ cherished freedoms,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.