(LifeSiteNews) — The Indiana Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Thursday as to whether there is a “right” to abortion under the guise of religious freedom, with the state attorney general’s office urging the justices to dismiss the proposition outright.
Indiana law bans most abortions throughout pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest, or “medical emergencies” in the first 10 weeks or “fetal anomalies” deemed “incompatible with sustained life” up to 20 weeks. It also requires medical care for any babies who survive attempted abortions. That law has stopped the vast majority of surgical abortions, yet chemical abortions persist due to mail-order abortion pills, which the state legislature has so far been unable to quash.
In March, Marion County Superior Court Judge Christina Klineman issued a permanent injunction against applying Indiana’s abortion ban to two anonymous plaintiffs who asserted “religious beliefs” in “bodily autonomy,” life not beginning until birth, and unborn babies being “part of the body of the mother.” One of the suing women identified as Jewish; the other “does not belong to a specific religious tradition” but claims “personal religious and spiritual beliefs that guide her life,” according to the suit.
The suit claims that denying them abortions would violate Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a 2015 law that says that government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability,” without demonstrating that it is acting “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and is using the “least restrictive means” of furthering that interest.
Indiana Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office appealed, and the Indiana Supreme Court agreed in April to take the case.
The Indiana Capital Chronicle reports that oral arguments spanned about an hour.
“Plaintiffs’ entire claim is built on a chain of speculation,” Indiana Solicitor General James Barta argued, taking aim at the challengers’ standing to sue in the first place. “During the four years that this case has been pending, plaintiffs have never been pregnant or wanting an abortion.” Justices pressed him to elaborate on how long the state believes a party must wait for a perceived or anticipated injury to actually occur before challenging.
“I think the bright line we are drawing is that you need more than someday intentions,” he answered. “You need actually a concrete course of action that you’re going to undertake that will run up against the statute.” Barta also denied that plaintiffs changing their activities so as not to “need” an abortion qualified as a harm, noting that one of them “testified that even if she won the case, she’s not sure her behavior would change.”
Arguing for the plaintiffs, American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana legal director Ken Falk argued that the law was already forcing women to change their behavior and that they “are always going to be in the position of either having to forgo personal behavior so they don’t become pregnant” or else “showing up to court when they’re pregnant.”
Later on, Falk granted that the state has a greater interest in banning abortion later in pregnancy but admitted his position that doing so would violate his clients’ “religious freedoms.” “The limiting principle obviously always is sincerity,” he argued. “And I know sincerity must be assessed with a light touch. But it’s assessed, right?”
The justices have not set a timetable for when they might reach a verdict. But back in May, Indiana’s highest court ruled almost unanimously for life in a separate case, rejecting Planned Parenthood’s bid to transfer jurisdiction in its challenge to the state’s abortion ban, which ultimately let stand a lower court ruling upholding the pro-life law.
Thirteen states ban most abortions starting at conception; another five ban it at around six weeks, with additional states imposing a range of later restrictions.
But the abortion lobby works feverishly to preserve abortion “access” via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states havens for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions, whether via activist lawsuits or state constitutional amendments.