You bet. It will be interesting to see what happens there when it gets to SCOTUS (assuming it will)
"Welch issued her injunction after a group called Hoosier Jews for Choice and five individual women challenged the abortion law under Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the plaintiffs represented religions including Judaism and Islam as well as "independent spiritual belief systems."
"The Court finds that S.E.A. 1 substantially burdens the religious exercise of the Plaintiffs," Welch wrote, using the formal name of the law, in granting the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction while the challenge to its legality proceeds.
"Although some religions believe that human life begins at conception, this is not an opinion shared by all religions or all religious people," the ACLU said in a statement."
"I guess we're about to see if religious freedom in this country only applies to Christians who don't want to pay for their employees' contraceptive coverage in corporate insurance plans. Or who don't want to bake cakes for gay marriages."
FLASHBACK - Democrats call Indiana’s near-total abortion ban a ‘death sentence’
Law, which takes effect today, contains narrow exceptions and effectively wipes out abortion access for 1.5m people in the state
Pro-choice protesters march between the Indiana statehouse and the Indiana state library on 25 July. Photograph: Michael Conroy/AP
Poppy Noor @PoppyNoor Fri 16 Sep 2022 03.27 AEST First published on Thu 15 Sep 2022 16.00 AEST
As Indiana’s near-total abortion ban went into effect on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers announced their dismay, referring to the ban as a “death sentence”.
The bill, SB 1, contains only extremely narrow exceptions in which abortions may now be performed – with abortions for rape and incest capped at 10 weeks; only to be delivered in hospitals; and limiting the procedure to medical emergencies.
“Hoosier women have lost a fundamental right to privacy in medical decisions with this near total ban, which is extremely cruel,” said Representative Sue Errington of the 34th district in Indiana. “I’m old enough to remember before Roe v Wade. And I know that laws like this only ban safe legal abortion. Women are going to suffer, and some will die from this,” she said.
The ban is being challenged in court by the ACLU and several abortion care providers, with hearings set to start on 19 September.
“The basic right we all believe we possess is to be able to control our bodies and make decisions for ourselves surrounding reproductive issues, without interference from the state,” said Ken Falk, of the ACLU. “But what the state is saying here, is, ‘we don’t care that your pregnancy is going to cause you severe mental harms or physical problems, you just can’t have an abortion’.”
Indiana lawmakers passed the legislation during a special legislative session in early August, with a six-week pause before it came into effect.
The law effectively wipes out abortion access for 1.5 million Hoosiers of reproductive age, and will have far-reaching consequences as Indiana had become a safe haven for those seeking abortion in other nearby states.
Now, residents in places like Wisconsin and Kentucky, which have total or near-total abortion bans in place, will have to travel hundreds of miles for the procedure. Meanwhile, other midwestern states, like Michigan, will put abortion rights directly to the public in a ballot in November .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/08/michigan-supreme-court-abortion/ .
“The impact is going to be felt suddenly. But its true force is going to be felt over the years to come,” said the Indiana state senator Shelli Yoder. “We continue to hear from healthcare providers that they are second-guessing whether or not they should practice in Indiana because the way the law is written, it puts their profession and their license at severe risk.”
The Indiana law is an all-encompassing abortion ban with some extreme restrictions. It limits abortions to cases where there is serious risk to the health or life of the pregnant person, and in the case of a lethal fetal anomaly up to 20 weeks post-fertilization.
Because of those restrictions, Yoder said she believed the bill was anything but pro-life. “It’s totally hypocritical,” she said. “You would think that if a state is going to pronounce they are a pro-life, that we would have a support network in place to actually help those living there.”
Furthermore, she said exceptions allowing abortions in the case of rape or incest will cause more grief – because of a clause that caps them after 10 weeks of pregnancy.
“This bill says, we are only going to give full constitutional rights to women if their very life is threatened, or they are a victim of rape. Then those women and girls have just 10 weeks to come to terms with the assault, being pregnant by their assaulter, and sorting through that trauma,” Yoder said.
Other experts have said parts of that stipulate abortions must be performed in hospitals or surgical centers owned by hospitals are going to have huge knock on effects.
“Historically, in recent years, almost all abortions have taken place in clinics. It’s not clear how many hospitals in Indiana will even choose to make abortions available,” says Mary Ziegler, a US abortion law expert from the University of California, Davis.
“Many hospitals have religious policies that are opposed to abortion. So requiring all abortions to be performed in this handful of facilities will make it more likely there’ll be fewer abortions altogether,” she said.
Ziegler says the law is just the latest in a set of attempts by lawmakers to change the national conversation around abortion.
“States that are criminalizing abortion are trying to create a new framework. It’s a conscious effort to say, ‘we shouldn’t be thinking of abortion as healthcare, we should be thinking of abortion as a crime,’ she said. “The more people in states hear that kind of argument and see things framed that way by people in power, the more some of them will come to believe it,” said Ziegler.
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