Indiana Court Gives Win To Group Arguing Religious Freedom Grants Them Right To Abortion

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Under Jewish religious law, abortions are both permissible and required under some circumstances. The laws outlawing abortions on based on the concept that one branch of Christianity can impose its belief structure on other religions. An Indiana court of appeals has just ruled in favor of a group of Jewish plaintiffs on this issue.

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An Indiana appeals court Thursday upheld an injunction for plaintiffs arguing that their religious beliefs entitle them to an exemption from the state’s near-total abortion ban.

A few individuals and Hoosier Jews for Choice said that they believe that life does not begin at conception and that the life of the pregnant woman outweighs the “potential for life embodied in a fetus.”

The argument turns one of the anti-abortion movement’s most reliable talking points on its head and takes the mantle of “religious conviction” from conservative Christians, who have wielded it so successfully, both in courts of law and public opinion.

“If a corporation can engage in a religious exercise by refusing to provide abortifacients — contraceptives that essentially abort a pregnancy after fertilization — it stands to reason that a pregnant person can engage in a religious exercise by pursuing an abortion,” wrote Judge Leanna Weissmann for the Court of Appeals of Indiana. “In both situations, the claimant is required to take or abstain from action that the claimant’s sincere religious beliefs direct. And in both situations, the claimant’s objection to the challenged law or regulation is rooted in the claimant’s sincere religious beliefs.”

Weissmann also pointed out that the exemption plaintiffs seek aligns with the (scant) exemptions included in the abortion ban.

“The broader religious exemption that Plaintiffs effectively seek has the same foundation as the narrower exceptions already existing in the Abortion Law: all are based on the interests of the mother outweighing the interests of the zygote, embryo, or fetus,” she wrote. “The religious exemption that Plaintiffs seek, based on their sincere religious beliefs, merely expands the circumstances in which the pregnant woman’s health dictates an abortion.”