Reuben Hemmer
Protesters gathered last year when Politico leaked that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
That’s according to the ruling of a St. Louis city judge, who has refused the Missouri Attorney General Office’s request to dismiss the lawsuit brought by religious leaders to overturn the ban.
Judge Jason Sengheiser ruled that the 13 clergy plaintiffs have standing in the case — a legal hurdle that means the plaintiffs can move forward to litigate the case. The judge also rejected Missouri’s other arguments against the lawsuit, including those based on the U.S. and Missouri constitutions.
The lawsuit was filed in St. Louis in late January on behalf of 13 Christian, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist leaders. It seeks a permanent injunction to bar the state from enforcing the ban, plus a declaration that the law violates the state constitution.
The lawsuit claims the lawmakers behind the abortion ban openly “invoked their personal religious beliefs as the reason for the law, enacting in the statute the religious views that ‘Almighty God is the author of life’ and that ‘the life of an individual human being begins at conception.’”
The lawsuit’s co-plaintiffs included the Women’s Law Center and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Michelle Banker, director of reproductive rights and health litigation for the law center, applauded the judge’s decision.
“I think it was a tremendous outcome,” Banker said Monday morning. “The judge rejected the state’s really extreme arguments that somehow the federal Constitution would preclude us from succeeding in our case.”
Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, said in a written statement that “We largely prevailed and can now litigate our case, which will strike this abortion ban down as a violation of the separation of church and state.”
The lawsuit plaintiffs, however, did not claim a total victory in the judge’s June 30 ruling.
Plaintiffs were challenging other restrictions in Missouri law, such as the ban on abortions after eight weeks. Sengheiser dismissed that challenge as well as a few others.
Maria Lanahan, the state deputy solicitor general, had argued that one of the plaintiffs, a female Unitarian-Universalist minister from Columbia, Mo., does not have standing to bring the lawsuit because the woman isn’t pregnant, and therefore “is not ready and able to have an abortion right now.”
Lanahan also denied that the abortion ban was being used by one group to impose its religious views over those who disagree with it.
“I don’t really see an official religion here,” Lanahan told Sengheiser during a June 14 hearing.
And even if the preamble to the law banning abortion contains religious language, “It has no practical effect on anything,” Lanahan told the judge. The law begins with the words, “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.”
During the same June 14 hearing, an attorney for the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys had argued that the faith leaders lacked standing to file the lawsuit because only health care providers — not religious leaders — can be prosecuted under the state abortion ban.
Missouri’s abortion ban went into effect a year ago, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Dobbs decision, overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving it up to individual states to decide on access to abortion services.
The law, which allows abortions only in cases of medical emergencies, stipulates women who receive abortions cannot be prosecuted. But it makes it a felony punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison to perform or induce abortions, while medical professionals who do so also could lose their licenses.
Two national non-profit groups are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit: Americans United, a D.C.-based group that advocates for religious freedom, and the National Women’s Law Center.
Christen Hammock Jones, a law center attorney, argued Missouri’s abortion ban requires the expenditure of taxpayer dollars to print up educational literature and to hire new employees.
This amounts to the establishment of religion that violates the state constitution and “requires taxpayer dollars be spent in service of that violation,” Jones said.
The abortion ban also favors one group’s religious views over everyone else’s, Jones said, thereby “forcing all Missouri citizens to act accordingly.”
Several of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs are from the St. Louis area. They include: the Reverend Traci Blackmon of the United Church of Christ; the Reverend Krista Taves, of Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood and First Unitarian Church in Alton; Rabbi Susan Talve, of Central Reform Congregation; and Rabbi Andrea Goldstein at the Shaare Emeth, a reform congregation.
In addition to Missouri, 13 other states, all dominated by Republican lawmakers, have outlawed access to abortion since last year.
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