By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to take up a First Amendment appeal from a faith-based nonprofit that runs five “crisis pregnancy centers” in New Jersey and that is fighting a subpoena from the state’s Democratic attorney general.

First Choice Women’s Resource Centers had urged the conservative court to throw out a decision from the Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals siding with the state. That decision required the nonprofit to continue litigating its objections to the subpoena in state court.

New Jersey officials subpoenaed the center in 2023 as part of investigation into whether the organization violated consumer fraud laws. Pregnancy centers are opposed to abortion, but New Jersey officials said their marketing may have left some patients with the impression that they could receive abortions at the facilities.

The subpoena was aimed at evaluating whether the center “or its staff engaged in misrepresentations and other prohibited conduct,” according to the state. It sought advertisements, donor solicitations and the identification of licensed medical personnel. The center framed the subpoena as a demand for donor names.

If that view of the subpoena prevails, New Jersey’s actions may conflict with a 2021 Supreme Court decision in which a majority found unconstitutional a California law requiring the conservative Americans for Prosperity Foundation to disclose its donors.

A divided 3rd Circuit ruled in December that the center’s claims were not ripe because state courts had not yet enforced the subpoena against them.

“The question of when recipients of state investigative demands can challenge those subpoenas in federal court before complying with them is an increasingly important one, especially in an age in which so many state attorneys general see their job in such starkly partisan political terms,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

“Whether the justices are going to generally open federal courthouse doors in such cases, or, like the court of appeals in this case, going to try to come up with criteria that allow for some constitutional challenges to these kinds of state subpoenas to be brought in federal court while requiring others to go through the same states seeking the information, remains to be seen,” he added.

Court backs religious groups on abortion coverage

The Supreme Court also threw out a decision by a New York court that had required religious groups – including a school tied to a Baptist church and a Catholic nursing home – to cover abortions in their health insurance plans.

It was the latest of several high-profile appeals to reach the high court challenging insurance requirements for abortion or contraception on religious grounds. In this case, the New York-based religious groups secured a win in part with the help of a charity halfway across the country fighting for an exemption to a state tax.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court cleared the way for a Catholic Charities chapter in Wisconsin to secure an exemption from state unemployment taxes. In a unanimous decision, the court found that the state law involved in that case discriminated against certain religions because it allowed an exemption only for groups that proselytize.

Because New York’s law involving abortion coverage similarly exempted only religious groups that are involved in the “inculcation of religious values,” the Supreme Court ordered the state court to review its decision in light of the Wisconsin ruling. The order Monday doesn’t necessarily mean the religious groups will win, but they get to try again with a new religion-friendly precedent in hand.

New York enacted a regulation in 2017, later mirrored in state law, requiring health insurance policies to cover “medically necessary” abortions. Though the term was not clearly defined, there were indications that state officials considered the requirement to include abortions in cases of rape, incest and “fetal malformation.”

“New York’s mandate imposes immense burdens on countless religious entities opposed to abortion as a matter of deep-seated religious conviction,” the groups told the Supreme Court in their appeal last fall.

Under the requirements, they said, an order of nuns that run a nursing home in Albany “are deemed insufficiently religious to qualify for a religious exemption – and so are forced to cover abortions in their employee health plans over their religious objections.”

New York officials countered that the state’s “longstanding regulation” was intended to prohibit health insurance companies from “limiting or excluding coverage based on type of illness, accident, treatment or medical condition.”

The New York litigation had made its way to the Supreme Court once before. The justices tossed out the state court decision at that time as well in light of a 2021 decision that held Philadelphia violated the First Amendment when it froze the contract of a Catholic foster care agency that refused to work with same-sex couples.

Both conservative and liberal justices agreed in early June that Wisconsin’s law, which exempted religious charities that proselytize from the state’s unemployment tax, but not others, was problematic. Churches already receive that exemption, so the question for the court was essentially whether religiously affiliated entities that don’t perform traditionally religious functions – such as services – could also qualify.

The problem with that analysis, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, is that Catholic teaching forbids using works of charity for proselytism.

“A law that differentiates between religions along theological lines is textbook denominational discrimination,” wrote Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal.

“This case involves that paradigmatic form of denominational discrimination.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.