First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin

Description:  First Choice Women’s Resource Centers is a Christian, pro-life, medical nonprofit that serves pregnant mothers, mothers of newborns, and fathers. New Jersey’s attorney general selectively targeted the nonprofit based on its religious speech and pro-life views with a wide-ranging, unfounded, and burdensome subpoena that requires the organization to expend its limited resources to produce extensive documentation or face judicial sanctions. The attorney general does not refer to any substantive evidence of wrongdoing to justify his onerous demands.

WASHINGTON – Pro-life pregnancy centers, along with numerous other organizations across the ideological spectrum, submitted friend-of-the-court briefs Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to hear the case First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys are representing the faith-based, pro-life pregnancy center in an appeal to the Supreme Court asking it for the right to challenge an unconstitutional investigation by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin in federal court.

Platkin is targeting First Choice because of its faith-based, pro-life views and demanding that it identify—by name—the donors behind nearly 5,000 donations and produce up to 10 years of its internal, confidential documents. The First Amendment protects donor identities from unjustified disclosure and prohibits a state official for retaliating against speech with which he disagrees.

“New Jersey’s attorney general is targeting First Choice Women’s Resource Centers—a ministry that provides free ultrasounds, baby clothes, and more to its community—simply because of its pro-life views,” said ADF Senior Counsel Erin Hawley, vice president of the ADF Center for Life and Regulatory Practice. “The U.S. Constitution protects First Choice and its donors from unjustified demands for their identities and First Choice is entitled to vindicate those rights in federal court.”

First Choice tried to defend itself in federal court, but Platkin responded by filing his own lawsuit in state court. That led the lower federal courts to say that First Choice must pursue its federal claims in state court first. ADF filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to grant review of the case and hold that civil rights plaintiffs do not need to litigate challenges to investigations first in state court before they can bring federal claims—the same standard that applies to any other person suffering constitutional injury at the hands of a state official.

“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 difficult pregnancy circumstances,” Hawley added. “The lower courts have wrongly held that First Choice is relegated to state court to present its constitutional claims. These groups are joining us in urging the Supreme Court to correct this legal mess.”

“As Annunciation House’s own experience shows, nonprofit organizations—which rely heavily on volunteers—bear the heaviest burdens when faced with short-fuse state investigatory demands,” explains the brief written by Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher attorneys for Annunciation House, a Texas Catholic charity. “The stakes can be existential—as in Annunciation House’s case, where the State initially pushed for closure as a consequence of Annunciation House’s inability to comply within 24 hours. Left unchecked, the process becomes the punishment. As the number of state investigatory demands rises, it becomes even more critical that the subjects of those demands can enforce their constitutional rights in an appropriate forum.”

“Threats to expose donors to non-profits places the ability to support diverse projects and opinions at risk by implying that potentially unrelated donors are linked, chilling participation to only those circumstances in which all participants are aware of each other and willing to shoulder the multifarious views of other participants—burdening temporary or limited-purpose cooperation with the risk of being painted with a broad brush. Driving civil society further into tribalism will harm us all,” explains the brief of Americans for Prosperity, which succeeded in defending First Amendment protections of donor confidentiality in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta. “If allowed to stand, this approach would gut donor privacy by allowing the state to insert its own policy preferences between a donor and the donor’s choice of charity and replace constitutional protection with procedural maneuvering.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

# # #