Missouri Supreme Court Rejects Satanist's Religious Challenge to Abortion Laws

[NeoGreen]

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/02/14/missouri-supreme-court-rejects-satanists-religious-challenge-to-abortion-laws/

Missouri Supreme Court Rejects Satanist’s Religious Challenge to Abortion Laws
By Hemant Mehta, February 14, 2019

The Missouri Supreme Court has ruled against The Satanic Temple in a case that involved the Satanists claiming a religious right to an abortion in spite of the state’s medically unnecessary 72-hour waiting period.

The controversy began in 2015 when “Mary Doe” sued the state. She needed an abortion, but the nearest clinic was hundreds of miles away. On top of that, because she had to wait three days between the initial consultation and the procedure, she had to make multiple trips to the facility or pay for lodging. That cost money she didn’t have.

It got a lot more complicated when she filed the lawsuit because The Satanic Temple, to which Mary belonged, says that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” Therefore, she claimed that the law requiring a 72-hour waiting period violated her religious beliefs. She was effectively taking a page out of the conservative Christian playbook in order to make abortions more accessible.

That lawsuit was soon dismissed, so she filed a federal lawsuit… which was also tossed out in 2016 because the judge said she wasn’t pregnant anymore, so the case was moot. (By that logic, though, could any woman ever sue over this problem?)

(snip)

Yesterday, all seven members of the Supreme Court rejected both the Establishment Clause and religious freedom challenges, saying that a lower court was right to toss out the lawsuit.

… the informed consent law neither requires a pregnant woman to read the booklet in question nor requires her to have or pay for an ultrasound. It simply provides her with that opportunity. And, while Ms. Doe mentions the 72-hour waiting period, she does not allege how that waiting period conflicts with her religion nor that it was an undue burden, nor did she seek to enjoin its enforcement prior to the expiration of that waiting period. The circuit court did not err in dismissing Ms. Doe’s petition for failure to state a claim

The Satanic Temple’s Lucien Greaves held nothing back in an email to me, expressing frustration with the ruling:

It’s a ruling that is both cowardly and fundamentally corrupt.

The Court clearly failed in its most basic duty to adjudicate based upon principles that can be equally and universally applied regardless of viewpoint, dishonestly claiming that the proposition that life begins at conception is devoid of religious context, and arrogantly asserting that a 72-hour waiting period presents no undue burden for those looking to terminate a pregnancy.

The implications of this ruling are clear: the state upholds the right to proselytize, and they also maintain the right to place activities motivated by religious belief — in this case, arriving at the decision to terminate a pregnancy based upon deliberative reference to our tenets — on their own time schedule.

I doubt, however, that the Court would be dismissive of the imposition of the dissemination of state-endorsed literature clearly inspired by a minority religious viewpoint, nor do I feel they would rule in favor of an employer who decided to move the Christmas holiday to July for the convenience of the corporation.

The upshot, however, is that the Court has asserted in their ruling that women seeking to terminate a pregnancy are not required to receive an ultrasound or listen to the fetal heartbeat, they are only required to be offered the opportunity. This was unclear before, but this precedent clearly indicates that women may deny this “opportunity.”

christian theology
christian theocracy

[LonePirate]

1. Is it wrong of me to say The Satanic Temple is doing the Lord's work on this issue?

[NeoGreen]

2. I would quietly say 'yes' ...

... this is more of a Humanist issue/action.

Your body is inviolate.


But I get the humor in your question.

[CrispyQ]

3. When will someone argue the 13th Amendment?

Abortion and the 13th Amendment

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers

2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, [e-mail]

I. The basic argument
The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:

1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion. When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude."6

Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into a servant caste, a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.

Parents can't be compelled to donate their organs to their child, even to save the child's life. Why does a fetus have more claim on a woman's organs than her child who has been born? Because it's about control of the woman, not the life of the fetus.