The Supreme Court handed down one of the most consequential First Amendment rulings in years Wednesday, and it did so without a single dissent.
Beneath the legal architecture of the Court’s unanimous decision in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Davenport lies a story the pro-life movement must understand clearly: a state attorney general, wielding the full machinery of government, set out to destroy a pregnancy center not because anyone had complained about it, not because it had broken any law, but because it offered women an alternative to abortion.
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers has served pregnant women in New Jersey since 1985. For four decades, it has provided counseling, material support and genuine care to pregnant women without the natural supports to help them carry their pregnancy to term and beyond. First Choice exists to tell them: you are not alone, your child has value and we will help you.
That is its mission. That is why the attorney general came for it.
In 2022, Attorney General Matthew Platkin created a “Reproductive Rights Strike Force” dedicated, in effect, to protecting the abortion industry’s monopoly on the narrative around pregnancy. Not a single member of the public had filed a complaint about First Choice. No matter. The subpoena came anyway, demanding the names, addresses, phone numbers and employers of virtually every donor the organization had received over several years.
This was not law enforcement. It was thuggery. The attorney general’s own rationale was that he wanted to contact donors to ask if they had been “misled” about whether First Choice provides abortions was transparently pretextual.
The organization’s website features photographs of parents holding infants. Platkin found this potentially deceptive. That tells you everything you need to know about the ideological character of this prosecution.
This is not the first time a state government has trained its regulatory guns on pro-life pregnancy centers. In NIFLA v. Becerra (2018), California attempted to compel those same centers to advertise the state’s abortion services to their own clients — essentially forcing them to become referral agents for the industry they exist to offer an alternative to.
The Supreme Court shut that down, ruling that the state could not conscript pro-life organizations into its abortion messaging. New Jersey’s approach is different in form but identical in spirit: use government power to make pro-life pregnancy work impossible, whether by forcing centers to promote abortion or by frightening away the donors who keep their lights on.
Consider who those donors are. They are ordinary men and women who write a check or make an online gift because they believe in helping mothers and children in need. They deserve to have that privacy honored.
The First Amendment protects the woman who mails a modest donation to her local pregnancy center and reasonably expects the government will not come knocking at her employer’s door because of it. Exposing donors to state scrutiny, especially in an environment where the attorney general has publicly branded pro-life advocates as “extremists”, is intimidation designed to make ordinary generosity too dangerous to risk.
Every donor who supports this work deserves the protection of the law and the respect of a society that claims to value conscience and the freedom to give.
The Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, ruled that First Choice suffered a real and immediate injury the moment the subpoena arrived. Supporters testified anonymously that potential disclosure made them less likely to give. When a pregnancy center cannot raise money, it closes. When it closes, women lose the alternative. That is not a side effect of this kind of thuggery. It is the point.
Gorsuch’s opinion draws on NAACP v. Alabama (1958), in which the Court protected civil rights activists from a segregationist attorney general demanding membership rolls. The tactic is always the same: identify a disfavored group, demand its donor list and watch supporters melt away rather than risk exposure.
The First Amendment has always stood against this maneuver, and it stands against it today.
The coalition that rallied to First Choice’s defense was striking. The ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all filed amicus briefs. When civil libertarians of the left stand beside a pro-life pregnancy center, something fundamental is at stake.
The abortion lobby has long understood that pregnancy centers are its most effective opponents not because they march or litigate, but because they show up. They sit with women in crisis. They hand out formula and ultrasound images and hope.
For the women those centers serve, and for the children whose lives they save, that matters enormously.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project and the recipient of the Religious Freedom Institute’s 2025 Religious Freedom Impact Award.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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