Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
A Marion County judge on Thursday issued a permanent injunction preventing Indiana from enforcing its near-total abortion ban in cases where doing so violates Hoosiers’ religious beliefs.
The ruling comes more than three years after several anonymous plaintiffs and the organization Hoosier Jews for Choice filed a lawsuit in Marion Superior Court arguing that the state’s ban, enacted under 2022’s Senate Enrolled Act 1, constituted a “substantial burden” to their religious beliefs under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. It turns a preliminary injunction issued in December 2022 into a permanent injunction.
“Penalizing providers to avoid the violation of RFRA is an untenable end-run around the conflict in these laws,” Judge Christina Klineman wrote. “The ‘substantial burden’ is the inability to receive an abortion in an exercise of religion which necessarily effects the person who is challenging it. The fact that a third party is likewise burdened (by serious disciplinary action) does not alleviate the burden to the individual seeking the abortion for religious purposes.”
She further wrote: “Having already found that the abortion law and RFRA are in conflict, and that the state has not met its burden of showing a compelling state interest in prohibiting abortions for religious exercise, the court now finds that the Plaintiff’s remedies at law are inadequate and the outright ban of abortions for religious exercise causes irreparable harm.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana represented the plaintiffs. Because the case was certified as a class action, the ruling applies to anyone whose religious beliefs would direct them to seek an abortion that would otherwise be prohibited by the state’s ban.
“Today’s ruling is a recognition that religious freedom protects people of many faiths and beliefs, not just those favored by the state,” Stevie Pactor, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Indiana, said in a press release. “For more than three years, our clients have challenged a law that forces them to choose between their faith and their autonomy. This decision makes it clear that Indiana cannot enforce its abortion ban in ways that violate their religious freedom.”
A spokesperson for the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, which represented the case’s defendants — including the state medical licensing board — said the office has already appealed the ruling to the Indiana Court of Appeals and is considering requesting review by the Indiana Supreme Court.
“As we have with every challenge against our pro-life law, we’ll continue fighting to protect the lives of the unborn,” the office said in a statement.
Thursday’s ruling does not completely block enforcement of the ban, Judge Klineman wrote: “This permanent injunction is meant simply to capture those rare instances where an abortion does not fall within the enumerated exceptions but is likewise a necessary religious exercise.”
The state’s abortion law, enacted following a special session of the General Assembly, allows for time-limited exceptions in three cases: if a mother’s health is seriously jeopardized — excluding mental health; if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest; or in the case of a fatal fetal defect.
In the Jewish faith, some say that a fetus becomes a living person only once born, and otherwise is considered part of the mother’s body and therefore does not have independent rights, the plaintiffs argued in their September 2022 complaint. For this reason, preventing the women represented in this case — and in this protected class — would be an undue burden on their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” the plaintiffs argue.
“Jewish law stresses the necessity of protecting the life and physical and mental health of the mother prior to birth as the fetus is not yet deemed to be a person,” the complaint reads. “As noted by the 19th century Orthodox Rabbi Moshe of Pressburg, ‘No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself.'”
The preliminary injunction issued in 2022 found that the state hadn’t successfully proven that nearly banning abortion procedures was the least restrictive way to further the interest of protecting unborn children, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. The Indiana Court of Appeals in 2024 affirmed that ruling, sending the case back to the trial court for review.
The case is Anonymous Plaintiff 1, et al. vs. The Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana, et al., No. 49D01-2209-PL-031056.
Read the complete ruling below.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.