By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a New Jersey crisis pregnancy center operator’s bid to block the Democratic-led state’s attorney general from investigating whether it deceived women into believing it offered abortions.
The justices took up an appeal by First Choice Women’s Resource Center of a lower court’s ruling that the crisis pregnancy center must first contest Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s subpoena in state court before bringing a federal lawsuit challenging it.
The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.
Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. Such centers do not advertise their anti-abortion stance, and abortion rights advocates have called them deceptive. The case provides a test of the ability of state authorities to regulate these businesses.
First Choice, which has five locations in New Jersey, has argued that it has a right to bring its case in federal court because it was alleging a violation of its federal rights to free speech and free association under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
First Choice is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has brought other cases on behalf of anti-abortion plaintiffs including an effort to restrict distribution of the abortion pill that has since been taken over by Republican states.
First Choice sued Platkin in New Jersey federal court in 2023 after the attorney general issued a subpoena seeking internal records including the names of its doctors and donors as part of an investigation into potentially unlawful practices. First Choice argued that there was no good cause for the subpoena, which it said chilled its First Amendment rights.
Platkin moved to enforce the subpoena in state court. Essex County Superior Court Judge Lisa Adubato granted that motion, finding that First Choice had not shown that the subpoena should be quashed at the outset of the investigation, but ordered the parties to negotiate a narrower subpoena and said that the constitutional issues could be litigated further going forward.
U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp then dismissed the federal case, finding that First Choice’s federal claim was not ripe because it could continue to make its constitutional claims in the state court and did not face any immediate threat of contempt.
The Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling in December 2024 upheld Shipp’s ruling, prompting First Choice to appeal to the justices.
In asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, First Choice argued that federal civil rights law is intended to guarantee parties a federal forum to assert their constitutional rights. It said that forcing it to litigate in state court would effectively deny it that forum, since the constitutional claims would be decided before a federal court could ever hear them.
Crisis pregnancy centers have also drawn the attention of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who in 2024 sued 11 centers for advertising abortion pill reversal, a treatment whose safety and effectiveness is unproven. That case remains pending.
Several New York crisis pregnancy centers sued James and in August won an order allowing them to continue touting abortion pill reversal.
(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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