The United States Supreme Court decisions have come in hot and heavy as they work to conclude their 2025 term. While all the rulings are significant, some tend to slip below the radar. First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. Davenport, Attorney General of New York was one of them, but the fact that the decision was a unanimous 9-0 one is important. With this particular court and the subject matter, you could even say it’s a major milestone.
Also from SCOTUS – NJ pro-life pregnancy can proceed with challenge against subpoena that asked for all kinds of records, including donor information. There had been no complaints against the center when the state started requesting the info. Court UNANIMOUSLY found a potential…
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) April 29, 2026
Also from SCOTUS – NJ pro-life pregnancy can proceed with challenge against subpoena that asked for all kinds of records, including donor information. There had been no complaints against the center when the state started requesting the info. Court UNANIMOUSLY found a potential burden on 1st Am rights.
The Supreme Court handed the First Choice pro-life pregnancy center a huge victory Wednesday, ruling that it can challenge a New Jersey investigation seeking its private donor information.
In a 9-0 opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the high court held that the state attorney general’s 2022 subpoena, sent after the creation of a “Reproductive Rights Strike Force,” was chilling to First Amendment freedoms.
“The First Amendment guarantees all Americans the rights to speak, worship, publish, assemble, and petition their government freely,” the Trump appointee wrote. “Each of these rights necessarily carries with it ‘a corresponding right to associate with others.’ Associational rights carry special significance for political, social, religious, and other minorities, protecting ‘dissident expression’ from marginalization or outright ‘suppression by the majority.’
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the SCOTUS opinion and said:
This Court has long held that “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association” as more direct forms of suppression, […], and thus has repeatedly subjected demands for private donor or member information to heightened First Amendment scrutiny. Throughout, the Court has recognized the critical role privacy plays in preserving protected association, and it has acknowledged that official demands for private donor information “inevitabl[y]” carry with them a “deterrent effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Gorsuch concluded, “Against this backdrop, First Choice has established a present injury to its First Amendment associational rights and therefore has standing.”
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Along with Tuesday’s FACE Act examination conducted by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, this is a huge win against the targeted weaponization of individuals and organizations who hold pro-life views, beliefs, and advocate for them. While the Biden-Harris administration has been the poster child of this on the federal level, blue state governors and attorneys general have long targeted pregnancy centers and their associations, creating laws like the “Reproductive Rights Strike Force” to decimate pro-life organizations’ ability to save babies, help mothers, and to advocate for the cause of life. The lifeblood of organizations like First Choice Women’s Center is their volunteers and donors, so this incessant targeting and lawfare is engineered to produce a chilling effect on any associations.
This has been the landscape as far back as 2015, when California sought to control the free speech of pregnancy centers by forcing them to recommend Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities to the women who came to them for counsel. The so-called “Reproductive FACT Act” was challenged and struck down by SCOTUS in a 5-4 decision in 2018. But as one organization posits:
The basic argument for the Reproductive FACT Act is that the pregnancy help centers were allegedly misleading women, a charge for which there is precious little evidence[…] The Abortion Industry bitterly decried the 5-4 decision in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra. But Supreme Court decision or no Supreme Court decision, their crusade to ruin pregnancy help centers continues abashed.
Fast forward to 2026, and the crusade has only deepened, with more states like New York and New Jersey attempting end-runs around free speech and free association. With this latest SCOTUS decision, as well as the re-examination of how laws like the FACE Act are used, perhaps the chilling effect rendered will be to the death merchants and their legal agents.
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