Month: July 2019

Indianapolis, Ind., Jul 1, 2019 / 05:22 pm (CNA).- An Indiana ban on dilation and evacuation abortion has been blocked by a federal judge’s preliminary injunction, continuing the legal fight over abortion in a time when the legal and political future of legal abortion is still in flux.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has said he will likely appeal the ruling.

“I continue to believe that Indiana has a compelling interest in protecting the value and dignity of fetal life by banning a particularly brutal and inhumane procedure,” Hill said June 28.

The Indiana Senate passed H.B. 1211 by a vote of 38-10, while the House of Representatives backed it by a vote of 71-25. Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into law earlier this year.

The law banning the second-trimester procedure was set to take effect July 1. Doctors who violate the law could be charged with a felony and a possible six-year prison sentence, the Associated Press reports.

U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker granted the preliminary injunction.

She said the law “prohibits physicians from utilizing the most common, safest, often most cost effective, and best understood method of second trimester abortion.” It makes doctors who perform abortions “resort to alternatives that are medically riskier, more costly, less reliable, and in some instances simply unavailable, while accomplishing little more than expressing hostility towards the constitutionally fundamental right of women to control their own reproductive lives.”

During a June hearing on the law, Barker had questioned why the state would push women towards “highly risky” alternatives such as prematurely inducing labor or injecting fatal drugs into the unborn baby.

The law bars doctors from removing a fetus from the womb using medical instruments such as clamps, forceps, and scissors. It makes exceptions to save a pregnant woman’s life or to prevent serious health risk.

Attorneys supporting the law said they have support from a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a federal ban on partial-birth abortion.

Mike Fichter, president and CEO of Indiana Right to Life, urged Barker’s decision to be appealed.

“Dismemberment abortions are painful and barbaric,” he said. “No baby deserves this horrific death sentence.”

“It’s disgusting that the abortion industry can simply overturn a law they dislike by filing a lawsuit,” he added.

There were 27 dilation and evacuation abortions performed in Indiana in 2017, state health department figures said. There were 7,778 abortions that year, meaning dilation and evacuation abortions made up 0.35 percent.

Most of these abortions followed prenatal testing that indicated serious health risks for either the unborn baby or the mother, the Northwest Indiana Times reported in April.

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the law on behalf of two doctors who perform such abortions. The attorneys said the law would put a “substantial and unwarranted burden on women’s ability to obtain second-trimester, pre-viability abortions.”

Barker, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, recently allowed an abortion clinic to open in South Bend, Indiana after the Indiana State Department of Health denied a license to the clinic operator on the grounds it had not provided required safety documentation.

The same day as the federal injunction against the law, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from backers of Alabama’s anti-dismemberment law in Harris v. West Alabama Women’s Center.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear the Alabama law, but he said the legal challenge to it “serves as a stark reminder that our abortion jurisprudence has spiraled out of control.”

“The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents States from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible,” wrote Thomas.

He said the court’s conception of “undue burden” is “demonstrably erroneous.” An “undue burden” standard currently renders unconstitutional any law that is a “substantial obstacle” to a pregnant woman seeking an abortion before fetal viability.

At the same time, he said the Alabama law does not present the right pattern of facts to challenge American abortion precedent and the case was “too risky” for the high court to consider.

Other Indiana abortion laws have been heard in the federal courts.

In May the U.S. Supreme Court upheld part of a 2016 Indiana law requiring aborted babies to be cremated or buried. However, it declined to consider another part of the law that banned abortions based solely on the sex, race, or disability of the baby, on the grounds that the law raises issues that have not been adequately considered by appellate courts.

The legal status quo on abortion is in doubt given the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pro-life advocates have hoped that strong abortion restrictions will soon pass Supreme Court muster again, if precedents such as the 1973 Roe v. Wade case are changed or overturned.

Some states have passed bans on abortion based on when an unborn child’s heartbeat is detectable, as early as six weeks into pregnancy, while other states have passed laws that secure legal abortion even if the U.S. Supreme Court modifies or overturns precedent requiring legal abortion nationwide.

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Washington D.C., Jul 1, 2019 / 04:18 pm (CNA).- The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case addressing the question of whether states can deny tax credit programs to parents and children who choose religious private schools.

“States cannot base laws on hostility to religion. Likewise, no provision of Montana’s constitution can enshrine hostility to religion into state law. We commend the Supreme Court for taking this case,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel John Bursch said in a June 28 statement.

The case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, was decided 5-2 in the Montana Supreme Court late last year.

The ruling found that the state’s tax credit program, which provided for a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for a person’s donation to nonprofit student scholarship organizations, permitted the Montana legislature to “indirectly pay tuition at private, religiously-affiliated schools” in violation of state law.

The Montana Supreme Court concluded that the tax credit program violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and that the Montana state constitution was even stricter in this regard than the U.S. constitution.

On June 28 the Supreme Court granted cert, meaning it will review the case when the new term begins in October.

Bursch cited a Supreme Court case from 2017, Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc. v. Comer, which ruled that a church-owned playground can be eligible for a public benefit program. The state’s natural resources department ultimately ruled the church ineligible for the program because of its religious status, but the Supreme Court ruled that the denial of the church’s eligibility for the program violated the free exercise clause.

“As the U.S. Supreme Court unequivocally reaffirmed in that decision, states cannot impose ‘special disabilities on the basis of religious views or religious status,’” he said.

CNA reported in March on a proposed federal tax credit-based scholarship program could provide a boost for parents who want to send their children to Catholic school. The proposed scheme, which U.S. Department of Education calls Education Freedom Scholarships, would be funded through taxpayers’ voluntary contributions to state-identified Scholarship Granting Organizations. Should the propsal become law, donors will receive a federal tax credit equal to their contribution.

According to the education department, the tax credit program could mean “a historic investment in America’s students, injecting up to $5 billion yearly into locally controlled scholarship programs that empower students to choose the learning environment and style that best meets their unique needs.”

The National Catholic Educational Association, which includes more than 150,000 educators serving 1.9 million Catholic school students across the U.S., is supportive of the plan.

A similar plan was considered earlier this year at the state level in Nebraska. That bill ultimately succumbed to filibuster in May.

The Second Vatican Council’s 1965 declaration on Christian education, Gravissimum educationis, said that parents “must enjoy true liberty in their choice of schools.”

“Consequently, the public power, which has the obligation to protect and defend the rights of citizens, must see to it, in its concern for distributive justice, that public subsidies are paid out in such a way that parents are truly free to choose according to their conscience the schools they want for their children.”

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Washington D.C., Jul 1, 2019 / 03:00 pm (CNA).- A rule to protect the conscience rights of medical professionals will be delayed until the end of November, the Department of Health and Human Services announced July 1. 

The administration said tha… […]

Brownsville, Texas, Jul 1, 2019 / 02:43 pm (CNA).- The bishops on either side of the Rio Grande, where several migrants died last week, expressed Friday their sorrow over the deaths.

Bishops Daniel Flores of Brownsville and Eugenio Andres Lira Rugarcia of Matamoros wrote June 28 to “express with much pain the sorrow of the whole community upon hearing of the parents and children that have recently lost their lives upon crossing the Río Grande River, seeking a better life.”

Óscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, 25, and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria died June 23, drowning as they tried to cross the Rio Grande from Matamoros. Graphic images of their bodies floating on the riverbank circulated across the world after they were discovered.

The bodies of a mother and three children were also found recently near Anzalduas Park in Mission, Texas, about 70 miles northwest of Brownsville.

“We offer our condolences to the families and loved ones of those who have died, and we recall that over the course of years countless persons have lost their lives in a similar manner,” Bishop Flores and Lira wrote.

They added that “united the families that suffer these sorrows, with whom we have been able personally to speak and pray, we ask God the Father for the eternal rest of their deceased loved ones, and we ask that He fill loved ones who remain with strength and hope in these difficult moments.”

“As we recognize the good that many persons do for our migrant brothers and sisters, we invite everyone, governments and society, to be ever aware that migrants are persons like us; with dignity and rights, with needs, sorrows and hopes. We must all extend a hand to help them have a better future, following the teaching Jesus has given us: ‘Do to others whatever you would have them do to you.’”

They concluded: “May Our Lady of Guadalupe intercede for us and obtain from God for us the wisdom, courage and strength to make it so.”

Martinez and his daughter, as well as his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, intended to apply for asylum in the US, but the international bridge from Matamoros was closed until Monday, so they chose to swim across the Rio Grande.

According to the New York Times, the family had left their home in El Salvador for economic reasons, and not to escape gang violence.

Tania, 21, is now at one of the migrant houses run by the Diocese of Matamoros.

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St. Louis, Mo., Jul 1, 2019 / 01:49 pm (CNA).- An administrative panel ruled Friday that the last abortion clinic in Missouri may continue operating while its lapsed license is disputed in court.

According to The Hill, Missouri’s Administrative Hearing Commission granted the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis its latest reprieve June 28, allowing it to continue operating without a license until at least August, when the next hearing in the dispute is scheduled.

The license of the Planned Parenthood clinic was set to expire May 31, but Judge Michael F. Stelzer of Missouri Circuit Court in St. Louis ruled that the clinic could temporarily stay open while its licensure was debated. That temporary stay was again extended at least two more times by Stelzer, who said that the clinic could remain open until the administrative panel’s decision was given.

Planned Parenthood sued the state of Missouri May 28 after the state’s health department declined to renew the clinic’s license. Representatives of the clinic have argued that there is no valid reason for state rules that mandate two pelvic exams before the administration of abortion-inducing drugs. It has also rejected state demands that officials interview its medical trainees on staff.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services rejected a license renewal request June 21 from the clinic, citing an “unprecedented lack of cooperation, failure to meet basic standards of patient care, and refusal to comply with state law and regulations.”

A 2016 report on an inspection of the clinic, the most recent available through CheckMyClinic.org, shows that the clinic at that time was in violation of multiple state standards involving the sterilization and storing of equipment, and the proper documentation of medication and procedures. Also among the state concerns are four botched abortions reported at the clinic.

While the state health department had demanded hearings with some doctors in residence at the Planned Parenthood clinic as part of its investigation, Stelzer ruled in early June that the state could not hold interviews of non-Planned Parenthood employees as a requirement for licensure.

The Hill reports that the next hearing in the case is scheduled Aug. 1.

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Denver, Colo., Jul 1, 2019 / 03:48 am (CNA).- Human trafficking is “happening closer to us than we think,” and Catholic groups are increasingly committed to fighting it through advocacy, prayer and action, global anti-trafficking leader Sis… […]