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It's Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Very big case argued yesterday before the Supreme Court of the United States. A case in which there is so much at stake and especially for Christians and frankly, for conservative organizations, or for that matter, just about any nonprofit organization that might be on the wrong side of any state attorney general. Okay, so here's what happened. Here's why the case appeared yesterday at the Supreme Court. It is because back In November of 2023, New Jersey's Attorney General, Matthew Plotkin, issued a hostile subpoena against an organization known as the First Choice Women's Resource Centers. The best way to put that is it is a pro life pregnancy center, and we understand what's at stake here. In the subpoena issued by the attorney General, there was the demand that First Choice would give the court, and give the prosecutor, in this case the attorney general, 10 years worth of documents, including its own statements on abortion, pill reversal, information it provided to clients and donors, documents identifying personnel, copies of every First Choice solicitation and advertisement, and information related to outside organizations that First Choice works with. There was also a demand for information related to donors. So you look at all of this and you recognize this is really big. This is a horrible precedent. Here you have a state attorney general issuing a subpoena and requesting, indeed, it's a subpoena. So it's not a request. It is a demand, a legally binding demand. So what a subpoena is, it is a demand for materials or information by a legitimate legal authority. In this case, in the state of New Jersey, it was the state's attorney general. And now the subpoena was received by the First Choice Women's Resource Centers, and, and it recognized this is a threat to its very existence. Now, why would the New Jersey attorney General be interested in this in the first place? It is because you're talking about a very pro abortion region and you're talking about an attorney general who was trying to make the allegation, and for that matter, right now is trying to make the allegation that First Choice is misrepresenting itself and misrepresenting its mission because it is implied that it has something to do with abortion, but it doesn't provide abortion services, nor does it refer women for. For abortions. So you can understand in deep blue, avidly pro abortion America, you could have this kind of hostile action taken by a state's attorney general. New Jersey's Not a surprise in this case. All right, so what did First Choice do? It did what you should do in this circumstance. It went for legal help. It went to the adf, the Alliance Defending Freedom. And that is a really important frontline organization that has been fighting for religious liberty and has made some really big wins. The attorney for ADF that was largely making the case at the Supreme Court yesterday was Erin Hawley. Her husband, by the way, is U.S. senator Josh Hawley. Erin Hawley is also someone with vast legal experience. She had clerked at the Supreme Court for the Chief justice of the Supreme Court. She's won several cases. She was very much involved, for instance, in the Dobbs case. That of course led to the reversal of Roe v. Wade back in 2022. She was making the arguments, taking the lead and making arguments yesterday. Okay, so why was she making an argument at the U.S. supreme Court? This was the New Jersey Attorney General issuing a subpoena. And so First Choice immediately went to the federal district court right there. So they're making a federal case out of this. They went to the federal district court seeking relief, and the federal district court said it didn't have jurisdiction. An amazing statement. So then First Choice appealed to the circuit, that is the U.S. court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and they were turned down there as well. And that's why they made an appeal for immediate relief from the Supreme Court of the United States. And that's why the oral arguments were held yesterday. Let me tell you why all this is so important. If you can have an Attorney General acting as prosecutor in this case in a state like New Jersey demand this kind of information from a pregnancy resource center. And yes, it is an anti abortion center. It is seeking to help women to bring their pregnancies to term rather than abort the unborn child. And the hostility here is really, really clear. The subpoena, as I said, was very large. All these documents, donor records, advertisements, solicitation information, and also information related to, quote, outside organizations that First Choice works with. You know, this sounds like a very repressive state, a very repressive force. This sounds like oppression from the state because that's exactly what it represents. And that's why ADF has taken this now all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course, the big issue here is whether the Supreme Court would intervene in this case and grant to this crisis pregnancy center the relief it needs from this subpoena. Now, there's something really interesting here, and that is that at various levels, courts have made the statement that the subpoena can't be appealed until a court enforces it. And the court there in New Jersey has not taken any step yet to legally enforce the subpoena. Well, this is where we get into an Orwellian, as in George Orwell 1984 kind of scenario here. The government issues a legally binding subpoena demanding this information and and then says, oh, but you can't appeal the subpoena yet because we haven't asked a court to bring sanctions against you for non complying. Well, it does appear that at least a majority of the justices at the United States Supreme Court yesterday saw through that and we should be very thankful. And even observers like the New York Times and different legal authorities, they looked at this and they said, you know, the Supreme Court didn't appear to take the Attorney General's case very well to make his argument clear, to take the argument very well. It is because here you had the Attorney General or the lawyer for the Attorney General in this case making the argument, you know, we hadn't basically brought in the cops yet, we hadn't arrested them yet, we hadn't gone to a court bringing, you know, action against these folks. We just issued a legally binding subpoena. But they can't appeal because we hadn't brought sanctions against them for not complying with the subpoena. And this is where the Big Brother part comes in. Because folks, if this goes the wrong way, then there isn't any crisis pregnancy center, there's not any Christian ministry, and frankly, even groups like the ACLU intervened in this because they recognize that if you have an attorney general in New Jersey that can do this to a crisis pregnancy center, then you can have an attorney general and oh, I don't know, let's come up with a conservative state in Texas that could take this kind of action, issue this kind of subpoena against a more liberal organization. This is something that is just wrong. It is indicative of a police state. And what's more ridiculous in this case is the state of New Jersey with a straight face trying to make the argument we haven't gone to a court to bring sanctions against this organization for non compliance with the subpoena. So they don't have any ground to complain or appeal. In other words, we have the right to crush you and you appeal being crushed. Well, if you're still able to appeal, we haven't crushed you enough yet. Abby Van Sickle for the New York Times opened her report after the oral arguments with this statement. Quote, a majority of the Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared to believe an anti abortion pregnancy center should be able to challenge a subpoena demanding its donor information in federal court. So let's assume for a moment that this analysis is correct and that the supreme court offers relief to this crisis pregnancy center. Is the case over? No, it doesn't say the case is over, but it does say that this woman's resource center would gain immediate relief from the threat of this subpoena from the attorney general. And so this is one of those situations in which conservative Christians need to recognize we need a victory here, we need a big victory for this crisis pregnancy center. But this big victory is not at all the final victory that will be necessary in this case unless the attorney general backs off, unless the investigation is basically ended with this kind of decision or this kind of action by the supreme Court. I think one of the most crucial points in the oral argument yesterday is where Erin Hawley, representing first choice, simply said that the organization in this case, a crisis pregnancy center, had been harmed. Her words were the moment it received the subpoena. And so it's not a potential harm out there in the future. There was a harm immediately because now you have this organization put on the defensive. It's either going to supply this information or live with a sword over its head the entire time that the court is going to bring sanctions. And so it's frankly ridiculous for someone with the power to subpoena information to say, oh, by the way, even though there's a court authority behind this, you can't appeal it until the court brings sanctions against you, or at least the attorney general went to the court to try to bring those sanctions. Erin Hawley made the absolutely sensical, I think, irrefutable argument that the harm comes the moment that kind of subpoena is actually issued by someone like the attorney general in New Jersey. It is clearly an effort to legally intimidate, basically to bring this organization to its knees and to do so, the power of the subpoena. At one point, the chief justice of the supreme court himself, John G. Roberts, Jr. Leaned in and asked a question to the attorney making the case for. For the attorney general there in New Jersey. That attorney had been making the case that there's no immediate harm to first choice by this kind of action. The chief justice then responded with a question, quote, so you don't think it might have an effect on future potential donors to the organization to know that their name, phone number, address, et cetera, could be disclosed as a result of the subpoena? End quote. In other words, I'm not buying that argument. And at least at some points in this, it appeared that at least some of the liberal justices weren't ready to buy it either. And one of the reasons is this. First of all, you have basic constitutional principles at stake here. You also have the political reality that if this can be used in New Jersey against this crisis pregnancy center, it can be used in another state against a liberal organization, say an abortion rights organization, and the constitutional issues would remain the same. We will track developments as this case moves forward. And it could move forward rather quickly, given the kind of relief that is requested. All right, A couple of other really big things we need to talk about today, and one of them is the birth rate. Now, as you know, the birth rate all around the world has been going down precipitously. This is a huge worldview crisis that is now translated into a demographic crisis. And the reason we're talking about it today is because of a report that was issued by an organization, and I'm going to talk about that report. The organization is the Institute for Family Studies, and we've talked about its data before, its analysis before. Very, very good stuff. But what really makes it interesting today is a report on that report. In this case, this report is on National Public Radio, very much on the cultural left, you might say center left, in that it's not so much extremist as it is just very generally leaning to the left. National Public Radio and in this case, NPR did a story on the report from the Institute for Family Studies on the fact that there is a birth rate differential that maps out politically. Okay? So I promise you, this is really interesting. Okay. So it turns out that if you take liberal women and conservative women, according to this report from the IFS, looking at a sample of women, 25 to 35 conservative women have more babies than liberal women, like, surprise who? I mean, that these days is just really, really obvious. And if you say, well, why is it so obvious? It is because so many liberal women are saying they're not planning to have babies and they're proving that by not having babies. And the other thing is, is that when you look at the divide not only between the genders, but between generations right now, the amazing thing is, and we've talked about this coming from other sources, very secular sources, independent sources, that the amazing demographic fact right now is that so many young women in this age cohort are not only not aiming for motherhood, they're not aiming for marriage. And so this is something that should alarm us all. But the Coverage of this story by NPR is really interesting. NPR brought on Brad Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Institute. He's a professor at the University of Virginia, very well established in this area, and he was the one of the primary figures behind this report issued by IFS about the fact that liberal women are having fewer babies than conservative women. And so NPR threw it to Brad Wilcox, saying, several studies in recent years have pointed to higher fertility rates in red states. And that's especially, especially true since the COVID pandemic. Then NPR said, quote, now a new report from the conservative leaning Institute for Family Studies. Notice that it doesn't just say Institute for Family Studies, but conservative leaning. That, by the way, is, I think, accurate. But it does show you that National Public Radio is trying to send a signal that argues that young adults who identify as conservative are having more babies than their liberal counterparts. At that point, the question was thrown to Brad Wilcox, who said that has clear implications, you know, potentially for everything from kind of public schools to congressional districts to just sort of, again, the trajectory of the country politically and otherwise. Okay, so in other words, Brad Wilcox came back and said, well, I think the impact of this is pretty obvious and it has to do with just about everything. Schools, yes. Politics, yes. Congressional districts, yes. And this is something, by the way, that has caught the attention of many in the media, including National Public Radio. And that is because there are a lot of people who are looking at the birth rate differential, the fact that conservatives in red states are having not just more babies, but a lot more babies than liberals in blue states, and the way congressional districts are apportioned, and of course, that's big in the news these days. You have 435 seats. They are apportioned by population, which is to say red states have been growing, at least in terms of the larger pattern in the number of congressional seats, and liberal states have been losing them. And so there are political ramifications. But again, Brad Wilcox basically says kind of the trajectory of the country politically and otherwise. In other words, what would not be covered by this? What would not be relevant to this? There is nothing more basic to a society than who's having babies. And I guess, on the other hand, who's not. There is no more basic question to society than whether it is perpetuating itself and how it's perpetuating itself. Okay, so the big question is the differential between women in blue states, women in red states. But more than that, in this study you are talking about, you might say conservative leaning women and more liberal leaning women, and State by state. There's a lot of analysis here. Okay, so it's interesting that at one point NPR brought in Melissa Deckman of the Public Religion Research Institute. And by the way, it doesn't say the liberal leaning Public Religion Research Institute, though it is, you'll notice the conservative leaning is to send a signal. They don't send the same signal. But Melissa Deckman goes on and says to npr, it's very clear that states that have had more Trump votes are seeing an increase in child population. But remember, these children are not yet voters. And so if you're trying to speculate how they're gonna vote in 10, 20 years, I think it's really difficult to conclude that this will advantage the Republican Party. End quote. Okay, so I'll just say, you know, maybe she's right. Maybe she's right. The conservative parents are giving birth to babies in a way that liberal parents are not, and in this case, that conservative women are giving birth to babies at rates that far outnumber liberal women having babies. And yet the claim is that won't have anything to do with the political disposition of children. Now, that flies in the face of most patterns throughout American history. In most patterns throughout American history, there is not an assurance, let's be clear, but there is an overwhelming likelihood that, that children raised in a conservative home are going to have conservative convictions, a conservative worldview. Christian homes have a Christian worldview, and in liberal homes, a more liberal worldview. There is some crossover in both directions. Of course, conservatives are far more concerned about the crossover in terms of conservative young people or young people raised in conservative homes. They go to liberal, say, colleges, and the next thing you know, they switch teams in terms of politics. But the big issue here is that the claims being made that it really doesn't matter who raises them, it only matters how they're going to vote 10 to 20 years from now. I will simply say the Christian default here, of course, is the goodness of having babies and the goodness of marriage, a man and a woman coming together, and children being a part of that. And the other things made clear in this report is that it turns out to be correlated. Big surprise here, no surprise here, to religious commitment and in particular across this country, to Christianity. It has a lot to do with it. Secular people are having fewer babies than committed Christians. That's just the way it works. I think the general principles and lines of a worldview make that abundantly clear. If you hold to a secular worldview, why exactly would you have a baby? Now, I'm not saying that you wouldn't. And frankly, a lot of secular people, that secular couples still have babies and secular women that still want to have babies, liberal women that still want to have babies, and liberal couples that still want to have babies. But, you know, the fact is that the differential simply stares us in the face. There's just. There's just no way around it. And I think we understand why. All right, so there, there's more to this particular report at National Public Radio. And so you have one person cited here. This is Leslie Root, researcher at the University of California at Boulder, who, according to npr, says the partisan divide is real, but she says the report leaves out a lot of women who choose to have their children later. Okay, so this is really interesting, and we need to look close closely at this and follow it, because the logic here is that, okay, this is leaving a lot of women out because this is looking at women 25 to 35. And the argument here being made by this researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder is that the liberal women are deciding to have babies later. It's not that they're not having babies. They're having babies later. Okay, does that wash? And I will say to some considerable degree it does to a little bit. It does have a little bit of traction here. It is because there are women who are delaying pregnancy later and later and later and later. And yet this points to another huge crisis, and that is the fact that so many women are waiting so long to have babies that it raises all kinds of infertility issues. And so, as we discussed on the briefing, you have major employers, in some cases offering IVF procedures, even the banking of embryos, if you will just stay in your job. A message to young women, don't leave the workplace and go have a baby. Instead, you IVF later. But the fact is, it's really a twofold problem. Let's understand this. It's a twofold pattern. Number one, the longer you wait as a woman to have a baby, the more complicated it gets. So the likelihood of having a baby after age 35 is lower than the period of time for a woman 25 to 35. But there's another dimension to this, and that's the number of children you might have. And so it just boggles the imagination, defies any kind of moral sense to argue that delaying having babies doesn't affect both whether or not there are babies and then, secondly, if there are babies, how many of them are there? Or let's put it another way. Let's just be honest. Let's Say you don't know anything about sociology. You don't know anything about this report. You don't listen to npr. You're just walking on Main street and you see a mom and a dad and a bunch of kids. Is your first thought, there's a liberal family? No, it's not your first thought, and you might be wrong. Maybe it is a liberal family, but the likelihood that it's a conservative, indeed a conservative Christian family, is just so much higher that the stereotype is quite understandable. And frankly, one of the things you hear when you talk to people on both sides of this equation is that both sides of the equation basically operate out of the same stereotype. Now, when a stereotype is held by both sides in an equation, that tells you there's a lot of truth in it. If both the liberal and the conservative, looking at that big family makes an assumption, the fact they're making the same assumption tells you it's a pretty safe assumption, not universal, but it still communicates something very real. All right. I greatly appreciate the work done by Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies, and we'll be talking more and more about some of the material that they are releasing. They're pointing unmistakably and I think with great urgency to the falling birth rate. And they're also pointing to the fact that the birth rate is not isolated from other contextual realities. It's certainly not separable from worldview, and we as Christians certainly know that. So, by the way, this just reminds us the way it should in every major issue like this. We're not just looking at the distinction between the Christian worldview and the worldview of the world, the worldview of the secular world. We are also being very careful to say the biblical worldview is true and for our good, which means that our faithfulness and living out biblical Christianity is going to lead. Yeah, to demographic consequences, you bet. But it is also for our good and for God's glory, independent of sociological research. Now, all right, just for a few closing moments, thinking of these issues, the fact that there is a developmental pattern to human life is not an accident. Right. This is God's plan. The fact that we are born as an infant and then we go through the toddler period and then young childhood and middle childhood and older childhood and adolescence and young adulthood and all that. This is all to God's glory. Growing old is a reminder of our mortality. Growing old to the glory of God is what we should aspire for. And we understand that the fact that there are different periods of life, even going back to the fact that Adam and Eve in the garden before sin, were told to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, which meant have babies. The basic developmental patterns are part of the goodness of God's creation, even before sin. And so you look at it and you say, well, okay, we should be instructed by that. The New York Times, just in the last day or so, has released a report. Here's the headline. Does the fertility cliff really hit at 35? So this is for women or for pregnant people? In the updated language of the sexual revolutionaries. This is about women asking, does a fertility cliff really hit at 35? Dani Bloom's the reporter in this particular article, and she says this quote, fertility doctors and researchers say that many women see 35 as a tipping point. After that, the theory goes, getting pregnant and carrying to term becomes really, really hard. The next line, that line of thinking is pervasive. It's also not totally true. Okay, wait just a minute. I love the English language. I'm deeply committed to the English language. I'm committed to paying attention to the English language when it's doing something right in front of us. Okay? So notice this quote. That line of thinking is pervasive. It's also not totally true. And so it is not true that a woman after age 35 cannot have a baby. It is not true that it becomes more difficult with age and that the likelihood of pregnancy and the likelihood of being able to carry a baby to term and all kinds of things, they change. This. This changes over time. And for one thing, it's not just over 35, it's how much over 35. And so I don't. There are a lot of people I know very, very well who were born when their mothers were in, say, their early 40s. And so that, especially before some of the birth control technologies that are used now, that kind of thing was certainly not unthinkable. But it is also true that the peak fertility and peak pregnancy carrying years for a young woman are certainly before the 40s. And that's just medically, very medically clear. And again, I'm not seeking to discourage any woman 35 or older. By no means is it impossible, but it is also different, the older and older. That's why they have the category of geriatric pregnancies. And we're not talking about women who are geriatric patients. It's just that this is an older pregnancy. All right, so the English language, I said pay attention to it. Just in closing, I want us to go back to pay attention to this language, we are told fertility doctors and researchers say that many women see 35 as a tipping point. After that, the theory goes, getting pregnant and carrying to term becomes really, really hard. And again, the bottom line in all this is that in some cases, yes, but the point is that it really is harder over time. And, you know, with every, every passing year, it becomes, and this is just documentable, it becomes, at least by some percentage, harder. But the next line is this. That line of thinking is pervasive. It's also not totally true. Okay, so here's the problem. I want to read to you two short sentences, and I want you to see if you can tell the immediate difference. Because in today's contested worldview context, you need to be able to tell the difference between these two sentences. Sentence number one, it's also not totally true. Sentence number two, it's also totally not true. Those are not equivalent sentences. So if that's totally not true means that statement has no validity whatsoever. I just want you to note that that is not what I read to you from this New York Times article. It does not say it's also totally not true. Instead, very carefully, it says it's also not totally true, meaning it's sort of true. There's more to the truth, but it's sort of true. It's not true. It's just not totally true. There's more to the story. So if nothing else, just as a worldview tool for good thinking, be careful to be able to tell the difference between those two sentences. It's also not totally true, and it's totally not true. Paying attention to that is really important, and that's totally true. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website@albertmohler.com youm can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts.edu. for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the brief. It.