CHICAGO, Aug. 5, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pro-life attorneys representing more than 60 members of the Indiana General Assembly have filed court documents defending Indiana’s measure defunding Planned Parenthood, which was blocked by a federal judge in June.
This week, the Thomas More Society filed an amicus brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in opposition to Planned Parenthood’s assertion that defunding abortion providers imposes an “unconstitutional condition” on physicians’ alleged right to perform abortions.
The petitioning lawmakers represent a large portion of the Assembly, which encompasses 150 members in total.
“We’re proud to represent the members of the Indiana General Assembly in doing the will of the people, both in preventing tax dollars from being used to support abortion providers and in ensuring that women considering abortion are fully informed about the nature of the procedure,” said Peter Breen, executive director and legal counsel of Chicago’s Thomas More Society.
The brief states that “abortion providers have no constitutionally recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to perform abortions” and that funding restrictions would not “interfere with the ability of pregnant women to obtain abortions. Accordingly, because the constitutional rights of women seeking abortions have not been violated, neither has the asserted right of their providers.”
In the trial court, the Thomas More Society scored a partial victory when U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt denied Planned Parenthood’s request to block a provision of an Indiana law that requires doctors to tell women who are seeking abortions that “human physical life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm” (previous media release here).
Society attorneys had also filed a “friend of the court” brief available here in the trial court on behalf of the Indiana legislators, defending both this provision and the provision of the law defunding Planned Parenthood.