By

John Fritze

Updated 1 hr 10 min ago

Updated Apr 29, 2026, 10:51 AM ET

PUBLISHED Apr 29, 2026, 10:13 AM ET

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Police stand outside the US Supreme Court on April 1, 2026.

Heather Diehl/Getty Images

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed a group of faith-based “crisis pregnancy centers” in New Jersey to fight a subpoena from the state’s Democratic attorney general.

The decision may make it easier for liberal and conservative groups to challenge similar investigatory subpoenas.

At a time when red and blue states are often pursuing radically different policies on abortion, immigration and LGBTQ rights, the religious nonprofit First Choice Women’s Resource Centers framed its inability to make its case in federal court as a threat to any group that could be targeted by state officials.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for a unanimous court.

“Since the 1950s, this court has confronted one official de­mand after another like the Attorney General’s,” Gorsuch wrote.

“Over and again, we have held those demands burden the exercise of First Amendment rights. Disputing none of these prece­dents but seeking ways around them, the Attorney General has offered a variety of arguments. Some are old, some are new, but none succeeds.”

The nonprofit First Choice runs five centers in New Jersey that are designed to advise women against having an abortion.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, a Democrat, subpoenaed the centers in 2023 as part of an investigation into whether the nonprofit violated consumer fraud laws. State officials said the group’s marketing may have left some patients with the impression that they could receive abortions at the facilities.

The state sought advertisements, donor information and the identities of medical personnel working at the pregnancy centers. The subpoena was issued more than a year after the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which set off a scramble by conservative and liberal states to either limit access to abortion or enshrine legal protections for the procedure in state law.

But while the case had ties to the abortion debate, it actually touched on different legal disputes over the power of state officials to investigate – and the power of federal courts to intervene. Underscoring that point, First Choice attracted an unusual group of supporters, including the US Chamber of Commerce, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The Trump administration also sided with the pregnancy centers, arguing that the nonprofit faced a credible threat of being forced to turn over the documents. But the administration was quick to assert that its own subpoenas, issued by federal agencies, are subject to different rules.

New Jersey argued that the type of subpoena at issue in the case isn’t “self-executing,” which means Platkin needed to get a court to enforce it. Because New Jersey courts had not yet ordered the production of documents from First Choice under threat of contempt, the state said, it was too soon for the group to try to seek intervention from federal courts.

A divided 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the center’s claims were not ripe for federal review.

During oral arguments in December, a majority of the Supreme Court – both conservative and liberal justices – expressed concern with New Jersey’s argument. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, at one point suggested that it seemed “kind of obvious that there’s some kind of objective chill from a subpoena on speech.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, another conservative, seemed incredulous at the notion that New Jersey’s subpoena didn’t involve the First Amendment.

Weighing on the case was a 2021 Supreme Court precedent in which a majority invalidated a California rule requiring charitable organizations to disclose the names of contributors. Both that appeal and the current case from First Choice leaned on a landmark civil rights-era decision from 1958 in which the court struck down an Alabama subpoena requiring the NAACP to disclose its membership list.

Such compelled disclosure, the court said in a unanimous decision in the NAACP case, would violate the right of people to associate with the group because they would reasonably fear retaliation for being named.