The Supreme Court Can End New Jersey’s War on Pregnancy Resource Centers

The Left is attacking pregnancy centers again. Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin. First Choice is a network of pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) serving vulnerable pregnant women in New Jersey.

Matthew Platkin is New Jersey’s attorney general, and he is trying to make life hell for PRCs in his state. How? By launching a series of politically targeted lawsuits with the goal of donor doxing and death by paperwork. 

Platkin has targeted First Choice on the basis of its religious and pro-life views by issuing the organization a burdensome subpoena seeking confidential donor and client information. It’s good old-fashioned lawfare.

I say the Left is attacking PRCs again, but it’s never really stopped. The last time PRCs had their day at the Supreme Court it was because Democrats, led by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, tried to force the pro-life centers to advertise and refer for abortion, a violation of their free speech and, in many cases, religious beliefs. Thankfully, the Supreme Court agreed with the PRCs.

Since then, the Left has only turned up the pressure on PRCs through rhetorical attacks, legal harassment, and outright vandalism and violence. Why?

Because pregnancy resource centers are unquestionably an increasingly important—and arguably essential—part of a post-Dobbs world that shifted the legal landscape around abortion. Yet the stubborn realities of crisis pregnancy have not. Pregnancy resource centers exist not only to meet the immediate needs of those women, but also to help those who want to be moms thrive in that role. This perpetually vexes the Left’s pro-choice idealogues.

What Pregnancy Resource Centers Do

Pregnancy resource centers first stabilize an almost always unstable situation. They meet the immediate health and material needs of pregnant moms in crisis. For some, that means baby supplies (diapers and formula). In just one year, PRCs nationwide served an estimated 1.85 million people, providing 2 million baby outfits, 1.3 million packages of diapers, 19,000 strollers, and more than 30,000 car seats. In New Jersey, where Platkin is on the hunt, PRCs served more than 23,000 men, women, and children with 8,713 pregnancy tests, 6,872 ultrasounds performed by licensed medical professionals, 9025 packs of diapers, 75,472 baby outfits, and 1,658 cans of formula.

For others, that help takes the form of housing. A woman named Monica found such help when fleeing domestic violence and homelessness while pregnant. Aid for Women pregnancy center’s maternity home, Heather’s House, took her in immediately and stayed with her for the course of her pregnancy and after she had a baby boy. The center’s staff even babysat while Monica took ESL classes.

“I can’t even begin to express how much Aid for Women has impacted my life. I was able to work on establishing a life for me and my son,” she said in an interview. “Everything in my life has been touched by Aid for Women and their support of me, not just having a place to live, but real support of me as a woman and as a person, has changed the direction both of our lives could have gone.”

Helping mothers establish a life is what PRCs specialize in. An estimated 1 in 4 women report their abortion as “unwanted or coerced,” 60% of post-abortive women say they would have preferred to have their baby if they had more emotional or financial support. One study found that 61% of women reported “high levels of pressure” to have abortions. PRCs provide women the support they need to not only make a true choice, but also to thrive as mothers.

Many offer career counseling, life coaching and parenting classes. One PRC so empowered Claire Anctil-Cathey that the former client went on to establish one herself. She said her pregnancy was like “being in total darkness” until she sought help at a PRC. It was like “being led into the light by people who just stepped in and cared for me and provided me the support that I needed one step at a time to get to a place where I was on my feet.”

“No one’s ever looked at them and said, ‘Well, you can do this, and we can help you,’” Claire says of her center’s clients. “Our main goal is to provide these women with the same sort of support that they would have from a loving, healthy family.”

This is what New Jersey’s attorney general and the Left want to shut down. So far, it isn’t working. The number of PRCs increased by 35% over a decade, and they now outnumber abortion clinics by a 3-to-1 ratio. Small wonder that 70% of those polled said PRCs should receive public funding.

They have become an essential part of a new, genuinely pro-mother era. The Supreme Court should shield them from ideological attacks aimed at shuttering them.  

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