US judge blocks Indiana’s law on fetal remains

INDIANAPOLIS — A federal judge has barred Indiana from enforcing a 2016 law’s provisions that require abortion clinics to either bury or cremate fetal remains, finding that they violate the US Constitution.

US District Judge Richard L. Young ruled that the law’s requirements infringe on the religious and free speech rights of people who do not believe aborted fetuses deserve the same treatment as deceased people.

“The Constitution prohibits ‘mechanisms, overt or disguised, designed to persecute or oppress a religion or its practices.’ The fetal disposition requirements are contrary to that principle,”

Young wrote in Monday’s decision, which granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs who had sued the state.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a defendant in the lawsuit, said Tuesday that his office will appeal the ruling, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The lawsuit was filed in 2020 on behalf of the Women’s Med Group abortion clinic in Indianapolis, its owner, two nurse practitioners who work at the clinic, and three women who are each listed only as Jane Doe.

Shortly after the law was signed in 2016 by then governor Mike Pence, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky and the ACLU sued the state over the law.

The state appealed that lawsuit all the way to the US Supreme Court, which upheld the law’s fetal disposition provisions in May 2019, allowing the state to enforce the requirement that abortion clinics either bury or cremate fetal remains following an abortion. The court’s ruling found that the state of Indiana had an interest in how remains are disposed.

Rokita pointed to that ruling in a statement Tuesday, saying that the law “safeguards human dignity.”

But Stephanie Toti, one of the lawyers in the 2020 lawsuit, told The Indianapolis Star after the suit was filed that she felt the US Supreme Court’s ruling left open the possibility to challenge the requirements as unconstitutional because they “trample on everyone’s beliefs.”