CV NEWS FEED // A federal judge Wednesday dismissed a challenge to Indiana’s pro-life law which was filed by The Satanic Temple (TST).
As reported by WISH-TV, TST “sued to force the state to allow it to provide mail-order drugs for its members in Indiana to have an abortion.”
The satanist group “claimed Indiana’s new abortion law, passed in 2022, violated the state’s religious freedom law as well as the Fifth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
TST is based in Massachusetts and operates a virtual “health clinic” that prescribes abortion-inducing drugs. The organization has named its “telehealth” branch “The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic.”
Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson ruled the group had no standing to sue.
“Although standing is permissible for ‘abortion providers to invoke the rights of their actual
or potential patients in challenges to abortion-related regulations,’ [TST] has failed to meet its burden to prove that there are actual or potential Indiana patients at all,” she wrote in her opinion.
Then-President Barack Obama appointed Magnus-Stinson to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana in 2010. She served as the court’s Chief Judge from 2016 to 2021.
“This lawsuit was ridiculous on its face, but this court decision is important because it sustains a pro-life law that is constitutionally and legally sound,” said Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita.
“We Hoosiers continue to build a solid culture of life whether satanic cultists like it or not,” Rokita added.
Indiana protects most unborn babies throughout all nine months of gestation, with a few exceptions. Indiana was notably the first state to adopt a pro-life law following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision repealed Roe v. Wade last year.
In June, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the law, finding that it did not violate the state constitution.
TST claims it does not believe in the existence of Satan or “the supernatural” and instead honors the evil one as “a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority.”
