Supreme Court Skeptical of New Jersey’s Push to Unmask Donors to Crisis Pregnancy Centers

First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday displayed little sympathy for New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s aggressive attempt to force a network of faith-based pregnancy centers to disclose their donors. At stake is more than just one organization’s privacy – it’s the First Amendment right of advocacy groups, left and right, to shield supporters from political intimidation.
 
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers operates five facilities in New Jersey that offer women free medical-grade pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and consultations. Platkin issued a subpoena demanding 28 categories of internal data, including text messages, emails, donor communications, and donor identities and their personal information. Failure to comply, First Choice attorney Erin Hawley told the justices, could lead to penalties “up to business dissolution.”
 
Hawley, also a senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, underscored that Platkin’s “sweeping subpoena” must be obeyed on “pain of contempt,” calling it a direct assault on the constitutional right to association. As she reminded the Court, “subpoena” is Latin for “under penalty.”
 
Platkin’s attorney, however, wants the Court to view the issue as a procedural question. His argument: First Choice should have slogged through the state-court process and endured actual harm before seeking federal review. In other words, wait until the state orders you to expose your donors, then complain about your constitutional violation.
 
Earlier in the day, Brian Hauss of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project explained why that framing is dangerously naïve:
 
“Even before they’re enforced, law enforcement subpoenas seeking sensitive donor information threaten to scare away supporters essential to any nonprofit’s work. At a time when government officials throughout the country abuse regulatory powers to punish their ideological opponents, federal courts must remain a venue in which people can vindicate their First Amendment rights.”
 

• During oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts drilled down on this point: “You don’t think it might have a future effect on donors if their names, addresses, and phone numbers [are] disclosed?”

 

• Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether any ordinary person would find “reassuring” the idea that a court order would be required before enforcement of the subpoena, given the chilling effect such disclosure can create.

 
Hawley reminded the Court that threats posed by disclosure is not hypothetical. In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the Court shielded civil-rights supporters from a state segregationist regime determined to expose and intimidate them. Under Platkin’s theory, she argued, NAACP “could have received a hostile review from an attorney general” and the Court could not have acted until after state courts reviewed the case. This would have given Jim Crow-era bigots plenty of time to harass donors.
 
And such intimidation today is no relic of the Jim Crow past. In AFP v. Bonta (2021), Protect The 1st highlighted real-world examples of donors, from religious groups to abortion providers, being doxed, fired, harassed, and even physically attacked. The Court agreed, holding that the chilling effects of compelled donor disclosure are “hardly a novel perception,” even when disclosure is limited to the government itself.
 
Judging by Tuesday’s argument, multiple justices seem alert to the danger. If Platkin’s subpoena is dismissed as a procedural matter, state attorneys general everywhere could weaponize investigative powers against ideological opponents, secure in the knowledge that the process itself is the punishment.
 
Predicting outcomes at the Supreme Court is never safe. But Tuesday’s session offered a hopeful sign that a Court majority seems to recognize donor privacy not as an administrative nicety, but as a bedrock First Amendment protection.

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