A Sword of Damocles Is Lifted From Pro-Life Clinics

A unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court on Wednesday rebukes left-wing officials for their misuse of the law to silence opponents of abortion. Will the Democrats get the message? We’re not holding our breath, but it’s gratifying to see the entire high court, which can at times be riven by ideology, emerge all on the same side when it comes to the First Amendment rights of religious Americans who support the pro-life cause. The dispute in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport arose after New Jersey’s Democratic attorney general, Matt Platkin, in 2022 set up what he called a Reproductive Rights Strike Force to bolster access to abortion. Mr. Platkin’s move followed the high court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. A chain of faith-based, pro-life clinics, First Choice, which aims “to protect and honor life in all stages of development,” came under Mr. Platkin’s scrutiny.“For years,” Mr. Platkin alleged, First Choice had “refused to answer questions about its operations in our state and the potential misrepresentations it has been making.” The attorney general demanded that the pro-life group turn over a raft of information including, the names of its donors. Mr. Platkin claimed the data, sought via subpoena, was needed “to ensure that First Choice was complying with all relevant state laws.”“Non-profits,” Mr. Platkin sniffed, “may not deceive or defraud New Jerseyans.” He claimed that his demands of First Choice were of a piece with “our traditional investigative authority” to ensure non-profits do not “deceive or defraud New Jerseyans.” If anyone believed Mr. Platkin’s rationalizations, we have a bridge across the Hudson to sell them. The attorney general, after all, had called pro-life advocates “extremists,” the high court noted in its ruling.The Garden State’s top law enforcement official, too, had warned that “charges” could be brought against abortion opponents, Justice Neil Gorsuch writes in Wednesday’s ruling by the Supreme Court. After such talk, it’s no wonder that donors to First Choice professed to be alarmed, as Justice Gorsuch reports in his opinion. These donors feared Mr. Platkin’s “record of hostility toward pro-life groups,” Justice Gorsuch reckons.Groups spanning the political spectrum, Justice Gorsuch contends in his opinion, range “from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and sided with First Choice in its dispute with New Jersey. The groups warned that a subpoena of the stripe filed against First Choice could give “supporters a very good reason to abandon the cause.”New Jersey downplayed the weight of its demands. During oral arguments in the case, the state framed the subpoena as a “request.” Justice Clarence Thomas balked. Quoth he: “I’ve never heard the term ‘subpoena request.’” To Mr. Platkin’s claim that “First Choice has not suffered any injury,” Justice Gorsuch offers an insight from Justice Thurgood Marshall, who wrote in an earlier case that “the value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs — not that it drops.”New Jersey’s pursuit of First Choice, Justice Gorsuch adds, echoed Alabama’s 1950s-era harassment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by demanding, say, the civil rights group’s donor lists. Such threats aim to “strip away the ability of individuals to work together free from governmental oversight and intrusion,” Justice Gorsuch avers. In that case, he concludes, “the freedom to associate may become no freedom at all.”

A Sword of Damocles Is Lifted From Pro-Life Clinics

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