Religious freedom arguments underpin wave of challenges to abortion bans

The New York Times Company

The lawsuits show “religious liberty doesn’t operate in one direction,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at University of Texas at Austin. The Indiana case was filed by Hoosier Jews for Choice, three Jewish women and a woman with independent spiritual beliefs. Judge Heather Welch of Marion County Superior Court has certified it as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of “all persons in Indiana whose religious beliefs direct them to obtain abortions in situations prohibited by” the ban.

Indiana’s ban had already been on hold because of a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit citing other objections to the law. On Friday, in a ruling in that lawsuit, an appeals court said the ban could be enforced. But those with religious freedom objections can still seek abortions until an appeals court rules in the religious case, lawyers said.

“We believe God is the source of all life and has caused us to share in the work of creation,” said one plaintiff, the Rev. Dr. Laurie Hafner, senior pastor of Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ. “The privileges and responsibilities of being part of co-creating,” she said, mean “women have the ability and wherewithal to make the decision that’s right for them.”

Baron, who belongs to Judaism’s conservative denomination, said her age and previous fertility struggles raised risks of pregnancy complications or fetal abnormalities. The lawsuits by members of widely known faiths follow a trail blazed by a less conventional religion, the Satanic Temple, which began filing abortion-related lawsuits after the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hobby Lobby decision exempting family-owned corporations from the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurance cover contraceptives.

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