(LifeSiteNews) — An Indiana judge blocked the enforcement of the state’s abortion ban on the grounds that abortion is a necessary exercise of “religious” beliefs.
In a Thursday court ruling, Marion County Superior Court Judge Christina R. Klineman issued a permanent injunction against Indiana’s abortion ban, which allows exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or “medical emergencies” in the first 10 weeks or fetal anomalies “incompatible with sustained life” up to 20 weeks.
She ruled on behalf of anonymous plaintiffs, including a Jewish woman who believes that “life begins” after birth, and that “the health of a pregnant woman, both physical and mental, must take precedence over the potential for life embodied in a … fetus.” Another plaintiff believes we should “not harm other humans or this community of humanity,” but also that life does not begin at conception, that “a fetus is a part of the body of the mother,” and that “bodily autonomy that should not be infringed upon.”
These so-called “religious beliefs” may entail the idea that a human life does not necessarily constitute a “person” with rights, but it is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception. As soon as the mother and father’s genetic material combine, a unique, complete genetic blueprint is present in the chromosomes of the newly formed zygote-stage individual, whose sex, eye shape and color, hair color, and even physical mannerisms are already “in writing” in their DNA.
Despite their anti-scientific and anti-life basis, Klineman accepted the plaintiffs’ beliefs that an unborn baby should be killed to preserve the “health” of the mother as a legitimate expression of “religion.”
“The state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act bars a law that substantially interferes with class members’ religious beliefs that a pregnant person’s mental or physical health takes precedence over that of a zygote, embryo, or fetus,” Klineman concluded.
“The abortion law would allow a plaintiff to seek an abortion if her pregnancy were the result of rape, but not if it were mandated by her religious beliefs. The state has not justified this differential treatment by establishing that its interest in the same prenatal life changes based upon the reason for terminating a pregnancy,” she continued.
Indiana Right to Life president and chief executive officer Mike Fichter decried the ruling on Friday in a statement:
For the court to rule that taking the life of an unborn child is an exercise of religious freedom is deeply distressing — and a perversion of the law’s intent.
Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act was never intended to equate taking the life of an unborn child with religious expression in our state. While this current injunction is limited to the plaintiffs in the case only, if it withstands challenge, it will be exploited so anyone claiming a spiritual belief, even if personal and non-theistic, can justify taking a child’s life.
We are encouraged by Attorney General Todd Rokita’s immediate move to appeal this injunction and pray it will be stayed during the appeal process.
The Satanic Temple in Indiana has also challenged the state’s pro-life laws in court on the basis that abortion prohibitions violated the group’s rights under the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Judges defied their challenge not because abortion was not considered a genuine exercise of religion but because the Satanic Temple did not have “standing.” Judges upheld in January a lower district court ruling which concluded:
… that the Satanic Temple did not have associational standing on behalf of its members because it failed to identify an injury specific to an identified member and rather sought to establish associational standing utilizing “speculation through statistics.” The court concluded that without identifying an injured member, the Satanic Temple did not have associational standing.
