First Choice: Republican Politicians Are Obsessed With Lying About Planned Parenthood

If you’re looking for abortion care in New Jersey, you might accidentally find First Choice Women’s Resource Centers instead. First Choice operates five “crisis pregnancy centers” in the state which, according to their client-facing website, provide free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and information on abortion pills and in-clinic abortion procedures. The homepage features a photo of a woman who is wearing medical scrubs and has a stethoscope draped around her neck.

But First Choice is not an obstetrical medical practice. It does not provide abortions, and will not refer people to medical clinics that do. And First Choice is not a real healthcare provider: It’s an anti-abortion Christian nonprofit. According to its donor-facing website, First Choice is committed to “presenting the gospel of our Lord to women with crisis pregnancies” and “assisting women to carry to term.” (If you’ve already taken abortion medication, First Choice does offer “abortion pill reversal,” which is not a real thing.)

In 2023, as part of a post-Dobbs effort to shore up reproductive rights within the state, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin subpoenaed First Choice and demanded a substantial amount of information, including documents that show how the organization describes its purpose to would-be donors, and the identities of certain types of donors. First Choice responded with a federal lawsuit alleging that the subpoena chilled its First Amendment rights and requesting that the court protect its ability to “freely speak its beliefs, exercise its faith, associate with like-minded individuals and organizations, and continue to provide services in a caring and compassionate environment.” 

But the district court dismissed First Choice’s lawsuit, and the appeals court affirmed the dismissal. The lower courts reasoned that First Choice’s case didn’t belong in federal court for two reasons: First, nothing had actually happened to the organization yet, and second, First Choice could make its case in the state court, where Platkin’s subpoena must be enforced. On Tuesday, December 2, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. Platkin to decide in which court the organization can make its case.

First Choice, in other words, is a technical case about federal court jurisdiction. But if you are a Republican elected attorney general, the case is all about the evils of Planned Parenthood. In an amicus brief in First Choice, 19 Republican attorneys general, joined by the Arizona legislature, contend that Planned Parenthood has “orchestrated a campaign of harassment and disinformation” against crisis pregnancy centers like First Choice—and that Platkin’s subpoena is “the latest in a long line of attempts by Planned Parenthood to chill pregnancy resource centers in the exercise of their First Amendment rights.” 

As a reminder, Planned Parenthood is not a party in the case, and its conduct is not relevant to the technical question the case presents. But the attorneys general could not resist the opportunity to take some shots at a longtime bogeyman of the conservative legal movement. Because the free services at First Choice “threatened” the “business model” of the “abortion industry,” they argue, Planned Parenthood commenced a “state-backed inquisition.” Although they offer no evidence to suggest that Planned Parenthood directed or even recommended that Platkin investigate First Choice, they claim that Platkin “handed the keys to his office over” to Planned Parenthood, and characterized his investigation as a criminal attack. 

“He is attempting to prosecute pregnancy centers that are not violating consumer protection laws at the behest and in aid of abortion clinics that are violating consumer protection laws,” they said. “This Court should not sanction Planned Parenthood’s effort to weaponize the subpoena power of its state allies.” 

The First Choice brief is hardly the first time that the conservative legal movement has used the courts to center their conspiratorial tangents. In 2019, for example, the Supreme Court declined a request to reinstate an Indiana law that banned doctors from providing abortions if they knew the patient wanted to end their pregnancy because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. 

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed that that was the right call, as a matter of court procedure. Nevertheless, he authored a concurrence that railed against Planned Parenthood as a promoter of eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Thomas said, “emphasized and embraced the notion that birth control opens the way to the eugenist”—arguments that Thomas said “apply with even greater force to abortion.” (The logic here is that birth control can prevent “unfit” people from giving birth, but abortion can prevent them from being born in the first place.) “Many eugenicists therefore supported legalizing abortion, and abortion advocates—including future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher—endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic reasons,” Thomas said.

After recounting some history of elite participation in the eugenics movement, Thomas went on yet another side quest: attacking antidiscrimination laws. The Court, Thomas said, “continues to attribute legal significance to the same types of racial-disparity evidence that were used to justify race-based eugenics,” and drove his point home by quoting a century-old eugenics textbook. “Just as we should not assume, based on bare statistical disparities, ‘that the Negro lacks in his germ-plasm excellence of some qualities which the white races possess,’ we should not automatically presume that any institution with a neutral practice that happens to produce a racial disparity is guilty of discrimination until proved innocent,” he said.

Thomas’s concurrence demonstrates that the amicus brief in First Choice is not a one-off occurrence, but a reflection of the conservative legal movement’s longstanding preoccupation with Planned Parenthood. Any right-wing crank with a law degree can run to federal courts and turn their personal hang-ups into legal problems for everyone else.