(LifeSiteNews) — The Thomas More Society is weighing in on a pending abortion case before the Indiana Supreme Court, urging the state’s highest jurists not to recognize a “right” to abortion under the guise of religious freedom.
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 fetuses 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, with oral arguments set to begin in September.
On June 3, Thomas More Society announced that it has filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the South Bend pro-life group Voices for Life, urging the court to reject arguments that religious liberty could possibly protect abortion.
“This case is a Trojan Horse. The ACLU and its clients want to call this religious liberty, but it isn’t—not under any historically honest understanding of the term,” said Thomas More executive vice president Thomas Olp. “From Cicero to John Locke to the framers of Indiana’s Constitution, the natural law tradition that gave us religious freedom has never treated the taking of innocent life as an exercise of religion. The ACLU is using a law designed to protect people of faith to smuggle in an unrestricted right to abortion. If this theory prevails, it won’t just gut Indiana’s pro-life protections, it will distort the meaning and purpose of religious liberty itself.”
The brief says that “exercise of religion” has never been understood to include abortion in the natural law tradition that shaped America and Indiana’s legal foundations and that, in fact, that tradition condemned abortion while embracing religious freedom. It also argues that state law firmly establishes the government’s “compelling state interest” in protecting preborn life, satisfying the requirements of RFRA.
“Voices for Life proudly stands with the Attorney General and the State of Indiana in defense of Indiana’s pro-life laws,” said Voices for Life executive director Melanie Lyon. “Religious liberty should never be twisted into a legal weapon to justify violence against unborn children and their mothers.”
Last month, 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 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.