New Jersey pregnancy center challenges attorney general’s unconstitutional fishing expedition

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The power of the state is again being used to silence and shut down anyone who disagrees with the Left’s orthodoxy, the target this time being a pro-life pregnancy center that helps women keep their children rather than kill them.

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First Choice Women’s Resource Center has filed suit against New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin after he served the ministry with a subpoena demanding a broad collection of internal documents — a move that the pregnancy resource center claims is motivated by Platkin’s animus towards pro-life pregnancy ministries.

First Choice is a Christian non-profit that serves women who are pregnant, as well as newborns and families with babies. It provides free services such as pregnancy options counseling; sexually transmitted infection testing and referral; ultrasounds; parenting education; and also material support, such as diapers and maternity clothes. First Choice, which has five locations throughout New Jersey, states on its website that it does not provide abortions.

According to the suit, filed on First Choice’s behalf by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Platkin has never cited a complaint against First Choice or any evidence to justify the subpoena “but has launched an exploratory probe into the lawful activities, constitutionally protected speech, religious observance, constitutionally protected associations, and nonpublic internal communications and records of a non-profit organization that holds a view with which he disagrees as a matter of public policy.”

Platkin is staunchly pro-abortion and considers the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson — which overturned Roe v. Wade and said there is no constitutional right to an abortion — to be a denial of women’s rights. The suit claims that Platkin used the help of abortion provider Planned Parenthood to draft a consumer alert claiming that pregnancy centers lie about the services they provide, provide inaccurate or misleading ultrasounds, and provide inaccurate information. He also warned consumers about potential privacy and security risks for patients’ health data. Platkin made these claims without evidence.

Platkin’s subpoena asks for a massive number of documents. First Choice argues it would require the attention of several staff members for an entire month to produce all the documents. First Choice says that it is short-staffed and complying with the subpoena would take “such a large deployment of staff and resources that document production would become the driving focus of the Ministry, not its mission of serving women and men in need.”

It also expresses concern about Platkin’s demands that First Choice expose the names of all employees, all associates it has worked with, and all donors, potentially causing them to end their relationships with First Choice due to fear of reprisal by pro-abortion groups.

First Choice claims Platkin’s actions encroach on its First Amendment rights, including the right to free exercise of religion. It also claims he has violated its Fourth Amendment right protecting against unreasonable search and seizure and is engaging in retaliatory discrimination to silence its protected speech.

The suit says that Platkin is also guilty of selective enforcement, noting his praise of Planned Parenthood and devotion to abortion and explaining that Platkin makes no mention of “several large, recent, and well-publicized instances of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America exposing consumer data without consent, causing breaches of sensitive patient information such as abortion method used and the specific Planned Parenthood clinic where an appointment was booked.”

ADF Senior Counsel Lincoln Wilson stated,

“It’s unlawful for New Jersey’s attorney general to use the authority of his office to harm those with whom he disagrees. Attorney General Platkin has aligned himself with Planned Parenthood’s pro-abortion mission and even enlisted its help to target pro-life pregnancy centers like our client First Choice.”

The Left has always loathed pro-life pregnancy centers, but since the Dobbs decision it has ramped up its attacks on these non-profit organizations. High-profile legislators like U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have smeared them, state officials have used the power of their office to investigate and intimidate them, and pro-abortion terrorists have firebombed and vandalized them.

The shared and unfounded language is striking as they all claim that crisis pregnancy centers are guilty of deceptive business practices, are dangerous to women, are “fake clinics” and “liars,” and need to be shut down. And it is that very language that has been spray-painted on dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers around the country by pro-abortion shock troops like Jane’s Revenge and Ruth Sent Us.

The suit notes that the attorney general’s consumer alert was leveraged by state Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. at a press conference, during which he called pregnancy resource centers “brainwashing cult clinics.” Gottheimer wants to shut down all pregnancy resource centers through legislation called the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act. This bill states that pro-life pregnancy centers lie about the services they provide and will create a commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.”

New Jersey’s efforts are similar to Illinois’s brazen attempt to target pro-life pregnancy centers with a law that regulates their speech and threatens their operations. The law, authored by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, was immediately challenged in court. U.S. District Court Judge Iain Johnston, after hearing hours of testimony, determined that the legislation was “stupid and very likely unconstitutional.”

In his decision to grant an injunction, Johnston wrote, “The bill is painfully and blatantly a violation of the First Amendment. There’s no doubt who the Attorney General wants to win or lose in the marketplace of ideas, but the government doesn’t get to decide that. The people do.”

Attorney General Raoul has subsequently announced that his office will not enforce the new law.

The Left is so feverish in its worship of abortion that it is engaging in fatuous, unconstitutional attacks on non-profit pro-life pregnancy centers with organized and ridiculous messaging.

Pro-life pregnancy resource centers don’t claim to perform abortions, any more than they claim to provide genetic testing or birthing services. They only claim to provide those services that help mothers keep their babies and support low-income families who are raising children.

Unlike Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics, these mostly volunteer nonprofits provide all of their services and resources for free, including counseling, medical tests, parenting classes, and much-needed material support like food, formula, baby clothes, car seats, and so forth. They do so out of love for mothers and children. And the people who donate to them do so out of love for mothers and children.

The left thinks that the only way you can “love” a woman is to make her believe that her only “reproductive” option is to murder her child. Hopefully, the judge assigned to consider this targeted fishing expedition intended to intimidate and destroy a pro-life pregnancy center will see it as Judge Johnston did: petty, stupid, and an unconstitutional effort to use the power of the state to attack those with whom it disagrees.

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