First Choice Women’s Resource Centers is a Christian nonprofit in New Jersey. / Credit: Photo courtesy of Alliance Defending Freedom
CNA Staff, Nov 21, 2025 / 16:20 pm (CNA).
When the subpoena hit her desk, Aimee Huber had to make a choice: Give up years of private information about her New Jersey-based pregnancy center network or fight back.
First Choice Women’s Resource Centers provides a range of support for mothers in need, including counseling, baby clothes and diapers, parenting classes, ultrasounds, and telehealth options.
But the state attorney general’s office was demanding “10 years of documentation on our donor communications, our advertising, our statements about abortion pill reversal, and even our donors’ identity,” Huber said at a press conference on Nov. 20.
“There were no allegations of wrongdoing,” Huber said. “It was simply a fishing expedition.”
The Christian medical nonprofit does not take any government funding and relies entirely on donor support.
“We are a small nonprofit, and the idea of compiling so much information was completely daunting,” Huber said.
“Since pregnancy centers like ours do not perform abortion, we are targeted by a government that disagrees with our views,” Huber continued.
Meanwhile, “New Jersey has the fifth-highest abortion rate in the nation,” Huber said.
“Our state has done everything they could to make New Jersey a sanctuary state for abortion,” she said.
So Huber decided to fight back.
“If our attorney general can bully us, it can happen in other states that promote abortion,” she said. “It’s our hope that our efforts will result in protection for pregnancy centers across the U.S.”
The case has gone through years of back-and-forth ever since the subpoena hit Huber’s desk in November 2023.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take the case, and the court will hear oral arguments on Dec. 2.
“This legal battle is never something we thought we would be involved in, but the women and the families that we serve are worth it,” Huber said.
‘My guiding light’
Meera* had just moved to New Jersey when she learned she was pregnant; with two young children, no family in town, and no insurance, she didn’t know where to turn.
But then she got a next-day appointment with First Choice Women’s Resource Centers.
“I was greeted by a group of wonderful women. They all spoke so well, and they treated me so nicely,” she said during a press call on Thursday.
When Meera couldn’t find anyone to watch her two young boys, she called the clinic to cancel her follow-up ultrasound.
“You don’t need to cancel your appointment for that,” Meera remembered the woman on the phone telling her. “Bring them.”
When Meera arrived, the clinic had stickers, snacks, and toys for her boys. Two women watched them while Meera had her appointment.
Since then, Meera enrolled in parenting classes at the clinic and has been a client for the past year and a half while she navigates parenting her third child.
“First Choice is my guiding light,” Meera said. “They saved me when I really needed them.”
“These women have changed my life,” she said.
Meera is one of 36,000 women that First Choice, headed by Huber, has helped over their 40 years of service.
Why the case matters
The case centers on free speech, according to Lincoln Wilson, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, which is helping represent the pregnancy center.
Wilson said that New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin is attempting “to harass and persecute First Choice for its protected speech and get its donors to stop supporting it.”
Platkin has “been overtly hostile to the mission of pregnancy centers,” Wilson said at the press conference on Nov. 20.
“He issued a consumer alert against pregnancy centers, warning New Jerseyans that they do not perform abortions,” Wilson said. “And he even had Planned Parenthood help him draft the alert.”
The alleged targeting has a trickle-down effect that can reach donors and even volunteers at pregnancy centers. Donors often prefer to remain anonymous or private given that supporting pregnancy centers is often stigmatized, according to Odalys Banks, First Choice director of centers.
“If donors and volunteers were no longer to remain anonymous, the center’s mission would significantly be impacted,” Banks said.
Volunteers and donors might pull back their support, she said, “out of fear of harassment or stigmatization.”
A board member at an Illinois network of pregnancy centers and maternity homes attested to the safety concerns for volunteers and donors.
“The fear of retribution by supporters of legal abortion is not a fiction, it is a fact,” said Mary FioRito, a Chicago-based attorney and longtime pro-life volunteer, in a statement shared with CNA.
One of Aid for Women’s centers was badly vandalized, and every year, its annual dinner is protested “despite the fact that the organization is not political, only service-oriented,” she said.
Centers “should not be forced to reveal the names of those who support them,” FioRito said.
“Donors and volunteers whose only objective is to provide pregnant women with support should not live in fear of being doxed for doing so,” she continued.
This case “matters to pregnancy centers around the country,” Lincoln said.
Pregnancy centers across the U.S. provide hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of service, medical care, and material goods a year, according to a recent report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
But they often face vandalism or even legal challenges from states where abortion is legal.
“They’re all subject to the same type of harassment, and especially after the Dobbs decision, many of them have suffered violence and vandalism,” Lincoln continued.
But the case is important for any organization, Lincoln said.
“Any organization, right or left, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on, there needs to be the ability to keep this information confidential,” Lincoln said.
*Meera’s last name is withheld for privacy reasons.
