ST. LOUIS – A group of religious leaders who support abortion rights filed a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s abortion ban on Thursday, saying lawmakers openly invoked their religious beliefs in drafting the measure, thereby forcing those beliefs on others who do don’t share them.
The lawsuit filed in St. Louis is the least of many questioning restrictive abortion laws enacted by conservative states after The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade up in June. This landmark ruling left the right to abortion to each state to decide.
Since then, proponents of religious abortion rights have increasingly used religious freedom lawsuits to protect access to abortion. The religious freedom complaints are among nearly three dozen post-Roe lawsuits filed against 19 states’ abortion bans, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Missouri’s lawsuit, filed on behalf of 13 Christian and Jewish leaders, seeks a permanent injunction preventing the state from enforcing its abortion law and a declaration that provisions of its law violate the Missouri Constitution.
“What the lawsuit says is that when you enshrine your religious beliefs in law, you are forcing your beliefs on everyone else and forcing us all to live by your own narrow-minded beliefs,” said Michelle Banker of the National Women’s Law Center, the lead counsel in the event of. “And that hurts us. This denies our basic human rights.”
Missouri Senate President Pro Tem Caleb Rowden, a Republican, called the lawsuit “stupid.”
“We acted on the belief that life is precious and should be treated as such. I don’t think that’s a religious belief,” Rowden said.
Within minutes of last year’s Supreme Court decision, then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Gov. Mike Parson, both Republicans, immediately filed filings enacted a 2019 law Abortion ban ‘except for medical emergencies’. That statute contained a provision that made it effective only if Roe v. Wade was lifted.
The law makes it a crime, punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison, to perform or induce an abortion. Medical professionals who do this could also lose their licenses. The law states that women who undergo an abortion cannot be prosecuted.
Missouri already had some of the more restrictive abortion laws in the country and has seen a significant drop in the number of abortions performed, with residents instead traveling to clinics across the state line in Illinois and Kansas.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of faith leaders from Americans United for Separation of Church & State and the National Women’s Law Center, said sponsors and supporters of the Missouri measure “repeatedly emphasized their religious intent in passing the legislation.” . Sponsor, Republican Rep. Nick Schroer, said, “As a Catholic, I believe that life begins at conception and that that is built into our legislative insights.” A co-sponsor, Republican Rep. Barry Hovis, said he was motivated “from the biblical side,” according to the lawsuit.
“I’m here today because none of our religious views on abortion or anything else should be enshrined in our laws,” Maharat Rori Picker Neiss, executive director of the St. Louis Jewish Community Council and one of the plaintiffs, told a news conference.
Lawsuits in several other states take similar approaches.
Indiana, lawyers for five anonymous women – who are Jewish, Muslim and spiritual – and advocacy group Hoosier Jews for Choice have argued the state ban goes against their beliefs. Her lawsuit particularly highlights the Jewish teaching that a fetus becomes a living person at birth and that Jewish law gives priority to the life and health of the mother.
A court ruling that sided with the women has been challenged by Indiana prosecutors, who are asking the state Supreme Court to consider the case.
In Kentucky, sued three Jewish women on the grounds that the state ban violated their religious rights under the state constitution and the Religious Freedom Act. They claim that Kentucky’s Republican-dominated legislature “imposed sectarian theology” by outlawing nearly all abortions. The ban remains in effect while the Kentucky Supreme Court reviews a separate case challenging the law.
But Banker said the Missouri lawsuit is unique because while plaintiffs in other states are suing for damages, “we’re saying the entire statute violates the separation of church and state, and we’re trying to strike it all.”
Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a statement that he “will defend the right to life with any means at my disposal.”
“I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children, and that includes unborn children,” Bailey said.
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Associated Press writer David A. Lieb of Jefferson City, Missouri contributed to this report.
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This story has been updated to correct that the lawsuit was filed on behalf of 13, not 12, Christian and Jewish leaders and to delete a reference to the filing occurring on the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade took place. That anniversary is Sunday.
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