A Hobby Lobby plot twist marks a win for abortion rights in Indiana

[Nevilledog]

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/indiana-abortion-ruling-hobby-lobby-rcna146844

The U.S. Supreme Court 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby allowed religious, anti-abortion employers to refuse to cover contraception in their employee health insurance. But an extraordinary April 4 appellate court decision in Indiana turned the conservative Supreme Court’s landmark Hobby Lobby decision into a winning argument for abortion rights.

The unanimous ruling from the three-judge panel, which found that the state’s abortion ban burdens the religious beliefs of those whose faiths permit abortions, signals the possibility of a long overdue shift in the conservative bias of religious freedom jurisprudence. It also signals the emergence of a partial, albeit untested, argument for people needing an abortion in states that have banned it.

The Indiana case was brought in 2022 by five anonymous plaintiffs of faith and the group Jewish Hoosiers for Choice. They’re seeking a religious exemption from the abortion ban Indiana enacted following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade that year. They said the ban violates their rights under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which, like the federal law the owners of Hobby Lobby successfully relied on to avoid providing contraception coverage, protects religious objectors from laws that “substantially burden” their “sincerely held” religious beliefs.

The plaintiffs argued that their religious doctrine teaches that a fetus is part of a woman’s body, not an independent being with its own rights. The abortion ban, then, violates their religious freedom to decide whether to have an abortion. This argument, which undergirds similar religious freedom lawsuits across the country, including in Kentucky, Missouri and Florida, is a profound pushback against the Christian right’s attempts to assert their position, that life begins at conception and that a fetus is a person, as the only genuine religious belief.

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