The Supreme Court Takes Up a Major Case on Anti-Abortion Clinics

Crisis pregnancy centers are back at the Supreme Court. The justices on Monday agreed to consider whether New Jersey can investigate anti-abortion clinics that seek to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies.

The case, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, is largely a First Amendment dispute. The clinics argue that the New Jersey attorney general’s demand for donor information would have a “chilling effect” on their ability to solicit money and operate. The question facing the justices in oral arguments this fall, then, is how and when federal courts can hear challenges to the constitutionality of such state-level subpoenas.

Attorney General Matthew Platkin and his office’s consumer affairs division opened investigations into the clinics in recent years, citing concerns that the clinics were misrepresenting themselves to both donors and patients and providing misleading medical information to the latter. When the case went before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Platkin argued there is no “chilling effect” from his subpoenas because they must first be enforced by a state court before they can be acted upon. By the same token, he argued, the clinics couldn’t yet ask the federal courts to intervene. The court agreed and sided with the state.

Platkin told the Supreme Court justices in a brief that while First Choice had a public-facing website that explained its “pro-life” mission and values, it also operated two other websites to solicit donations without any reference to its mission. “Instead, one of these sites simply says that clients should ‘consult a medical professional’ before seeking an abortion, and claims that is ‘a network of clinics providing the best care and most up-to-date information on your pregnancy and pregnancy options,’” he wrote.

The goal of anti-abortion clinics, which are often billed in more generic terms as “crisis pregnancy centers” or “pregnancy resource centers,” is to persuade or deter women from obtaining abortions. A certain amount of deception is part of the strategy. The clinics rarely promote themselves as anti-abortion and use vague language that could lead women to assume that they are abortion providers.