Far-Right Law Firm Behind the End of ‘Roe’ Just Got Another Anti-Abortion Case Before the Supreme Court

The Court will hear a case involving a subpoena issued to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a network of crisis pregnancy centers in New Jersey. The group is represented by the Christian nationalist law firm Alliance Defending Freedom.

By Lauren Tousignant  |  June 17, 2025 | 1:14pm
Photo: Getty Images AbortionPolitics
Far-Right Law Firm Behind the End of ‘Roe’ Just Got Another Anti-Abortion Case Before the Supreme Court

First things first: Crisis pregnancy centers are not reproductive health clinics. They’re a predatory, religious front posing as healthcare providers that target vulnerable pregnant women with things like free counseling or pregnancy tests—then pressure them against having an abortion. If the patient refuses or tries to leave, they often face harassment from the center’s workers.

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case involving a subpoena against CPCs. And, surprise, surprise, the CPCs in question, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom—the far-right Christian nationalist law group that helped the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. 

In 2023, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin issued a subpoena to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, accusing them of misleading women into thinking they provided referrals for abortion clinics. Platkin sought information about First Choice’s advertisements, staff, and donors. The Centers challenged the subpoena, but a federal judge said the case wasn’t far along enough, and an appeals court agreed. So the centers appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that Platkin’s push for their donor information violated their First Amendment rights.

In a brief urging the Supreme Court to pass on the case, Platkin wrote that he’s trying to investigate whether First Choice “misled donors and potential clients, among others, into believing that” they were “providing certain reproductive health care services.”

“Identifying those donors,” the brief continued, “would allow the state to determine if they were ultimately misled.”

But First Choice is banking its case on a 2021 Supreme Court decision that “said California could not require all charities soliciting contributions in the state to report the identities of their major donors while leaving open the possibility of targeted subpoenas,” according to the New York Times. 

ADF wrote the Mississippi abortion ban that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. The group also won a 2018 Supreme Court case on behalf of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in California, in which the Court ruled that the state could not require CPCs to provide patients with information about how to end a pregnancy.

Across the country, and especially since Roe was overturned, CPCs have been growing. And, in states with abortion bans or GOP-controlled legislatures, their funding has exploded. In July 2024, ProPublica reported that, in Texas, Alternatives to Abortion (now named Thriving Texas Families) received $5 million in state funding in 2005; today, it receives $140 million. Even worse, those funds have been severely mismanaged, and no one really knows where or to whom those millions are going or what they’re paying for.

“Unfortunately, this is something we’ve seen across a number of states pushing ‘Alternatives to Abortion’ programs,” Shireen Shakouri, executive vice president of Reproaction, which tracks CPCs’ tactics and funding, told Jezebel in a statement at the time. “There is little verification or regulation of how the money is spent, and often minimal evaluation of whether the funding was actually effective in meeting the program’s stated purpose.”

So it seems, at least to me, totally valid that an attorney general might be curious about the operating details or donor structure of a religious organization pretending to be a reproductive health center. Obviously, the conservative-majority Court feels otherwise.

“First Choice is looking for a special exception from the usual procedural rules as it tries to avoid complying with an entirely lawful state subpoena,” Platkin said Monday. “No industry is entitled to that type of special treatment — period.”

Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.

 
Join the discussion...