Indiana Court Rules Abortion is a Religious Practice Protected by Religious Freedom

For years now, we’ve been told to cool it with the comparisons of abortion to ancient paganism. Stop invoking Molech. Stop talking about sacrifice. Stop saying that modern society is quietly reenacting the most perverse rituals of the ancient world. We’re told, even by our church leaders, that it’s “rhetorical excess” from people who take the Bible too seriously and modernity not seriously enough.

And yet here we are. A judge in Indiana has now ruled that there can be a religious right to abortion. Not metaphorically or rhetorically. Not even as a philosophical analogy.

Literally.

In a March 5 order out of the Marion Superior Court (pasted below), Judge Christina Klineman granted summary judgment to a group of plaintiffs—two anonymous women and an advocacy group called “Hoosier Jews for Choice.”

Their argument was simple and impudent. Indiana’s abortion restrictions violate the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because their religious beliefs require access to abortion in certain circumstances. The judge agreed and issued a permanent injunction preventing the state from enforcing portions of its abortion law against members of the plaintiff class when abortion is claimed as a religious exercise.

The court concluded that abortion can qualify as an exercise of religion, and therefore the state may not prohibit it if doing so would substantially burden that religious practice.

One plaintiff testified that her religious belief is that life begins at first breath and that Jewish law requires abortion when the physical or mental health of the mother is threatened. Another claimed a spiritual belief rooted in something like a cosmic collective consciousness—a kind of vague New Age metaphysics—which she says gives her a religious obligation to maintain bodily autonomy, including the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The court took those claims at face value.

Because Indiana’s RFRA bars the government from substantially burdening a person’s religious exercise unless the state can prove a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means, the judge concluded that the abortion ban could not stand in those situations.

And there it is. The quiet admission.