Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced on Nov. 29 that his team won a court battle over the state’s contentious law regarding the disposal of aborted fetal tissue.
Rokita called the victory a “win” for the “dignity of life” when his office announced the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision to uphold Indiana’s law requiring medical facilities to bury or cremate fetal remains following abortions.
The plaintiffs claimed in their recent case that the law violated their First Amendment rights by requiring them to accept the state’s view of the personhood of an unborn child.
They also assert that the law’s demand that abortion clinics give mothers the option of burial, cremation, or taking their aborted baby’s remains home to dispose of, was tantamount to compelled speech for the doctors involved.
U.S. District Judge Richard Young in Indianapolis sided with the plaintiffs, saying the law was unconstitutional and barred the state from enforcing it. However, the state appealed the case and Judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit disagreed.
Easterbrook said the women’s rights were not violated since they were not forced to bury or cremate the remains, and the doctors’ rights were not violated by the requirement that they give accurate information about what Indiana law requires.
The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the state, upholding the law, in 2019. This was noted by Indiana’s Solicitor General Thomas Fisher when he commented on the recent case, saying “Given the Supreme Court’s earlier decision upholding this very law, we were perplexed that the U.S. district court somehow found the plaintiffs’ arguments persuasive. The appeals court provided a fast—and much-needed—course correction.”
When asked about recent challenges on issues surrounding abortion Rokita told The Epoch Times that the sanctity of life continues to be a key issue in his office.
“Like most Hoosiers, I believe in building a culture of life, not the culture of death that Hollywood, the media, and the Left promote,” the attorney general said.
“That means protecting the lives of unborn babies and safeguarding the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of their mothers. Preserving the sanctity of life is and always will be a top priority.”
When asked if abortion-related court cases have increased since the Dobbs ruling, the pro-life advocate said what they are seeing currently is “a continuation of attacks by abortionists and the abortion industry to challenge any law that protects unborn children and their mothers.”
“For almost 50 years, laws protecting babies and their moms were challenged in [usually] federal courts and frequently struck by judges who said abortion was allowed under the U.S. Constitution because of Roe v. Wade,” Tobias said.
She went on to explain the way her organization has seen activists attempt to retain abortion rights in individual states: “Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, in Dobbs v. Jackson, that Roe was wrongly decided—a right to kill preborn humans is not in the US Constitution—the abortion industry is challenging laws protective of preborn children before state judges.
“Unfortunately, those state judges are making the same mistake the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court made and creating a right to abortion in the state’s constitution.
“The laws being challenged now are mostly those laws that were in place, but not in effect, because of Roe v. Wade, i.e. trigger laws or pre-Roe laws still on the books,” Tobias said.
“The problem is that state judges are looking at state constitutions like a Rorschach inkblot test, interpreting the document to mean whatever they want it to mean.”
