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A federal appeals court dismissed the Satanic Temple’s lawsuit against the state’s ban on telehealth abortion medication, upholding a lower court’s ruling that the religious institution lacked standing.
The Satanic Temple, a non-theistic religious organization, filed the lawsuit against Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears in district court in 2022, seeking to prevent enforcement of the state’s law criminalizing telehealth abortion medication. After the district court found Satanic Temple failed to show any real injury to itself or its members, the institution appealed.
But the appellate court affirmed the previous ruling on Tuesday, saying the institution “has not pointed to any member … who is in fact injured.”
William MacNaughton, a New Jersey-based attorney representing Satanic Temple, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This lawsuit was ridiculous from the start, but this unanimous court decision is a critical victory because it continues to uphold our pro-life law that is constitutionally and legally rock-solid,” Rokita said in a written statement. “Our state has proudly built a strong culture of life, and no satanic cult—or any extremist group—is going to stop us.”
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Indiana was the first state to pass a near-total abortion ban. Abortion is only allowed under certain circumstances, like for the health of the mother, and abortion-inducing medication may only be given to a woman by a licensed physician in a hospital.
According to Satanic Temple, the institution has seven “fundamental” tenets its members follow. One tenet, in particular, establishes that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” And according to the ruling, the Temple also has a “Satanic Abortion Ritual,” a meditative ritual meant to “cast off notions of guilt, shame, and mental discomfort that a patient may be experiencing due to choosing to have a medically safe and legal abortion.”
According to court documents, the Satanic Temple maintains a New Mexico-based telehealth abortion clinic to “further the following of these Tenets among its members and facilitate their ability to perform the ritual.”
Satanic Temple argued its religious freedoms were violated because it could not operate its clinic to reach its Indiana members because of the state’s anti-abortion law.
But because the Temple did not provide specific individuals or instances in which its members were impacted by the law in a “concrete and particularized way,” according to the court’s ruling, the appellate court affirmed that the Satanic Temple did not have standing to bring suit.
The ruling can be viewed here.
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