The Indiana ruling is part of a growing multi-state legal strategy in which Jewish, Unitarian, Buddhist, Episcopal, and other faith plaintiffs are challenging abortion bans in Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Utah, Wyoming, and Florida on the grounds that those bans impose a narrow Christian doctrinal view of when life begins onto citizens of all faiths — a direct violation of both state and federal church-state principles. Missouri’s abortion ban explicitly declares that “Almighty God is the author of life,” language that one dissenting Missouri legislator described at the time of passage as itself a violation of the separation of church and state. During the original Dobbs oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor put the question directly to Mississippi’s counsel: “How is your interest anything but a religious view?” — a question that received no coherent answer and now forms the philosophical backbone of this emerging litigation strategy.
Source: State Court Report, KFF, The Progressive, Stanford Law Review — March 2026
This was inevitable. At the end of the day, opposition to abortion springs from a conviction (which I share as a Catholic) that human life is sacred from conception to natural death. Its roots lie in the theology of the Incarnation and the belief that God, in assuming our humanity, did so at the moment of conception (“he was conceived by the Holy Spirit”). There are, of course, some few who oppose abortion on other philosophical and theological grounds. But historically, the roots of mass opposition to abortion spring from Christian seed.
That means that there are lots of people from other (and no) faith traditions who see no reason at all why they should oppose abortion and who regard the attempt to make them embrace a theology they do not, in fact, embrace as an imposition on their conscience. Such people are inevitably going to fight for abortion rights on the ground of religious liberty. It will be fascinating to watch stuff like the Religious Liberty Commission try to figure out how to square that circle.
Me: I agree with Paul that the attempt to achieve righteousness by the imposition of law is impossible and that only grace can save and heal and redeem. But the MAGA “prolife” cult has long ago abandoned grace and chosen to try to establish the Kingdom by law, force, terror, blood, and iron. Having abandoned faith in Christ, they now have faith only in raw nihilist power.
Of which more tomorrow.
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MAGA likes to couch a lot of it’s legislative and court strategies as “religious freedom”, but they only mean freedom for MAGA Christians.
What they want is a theocracy. The rest of us are not going to come along quietly. That’s a promise.
My Mother used to say:
“It all comes out in the final wash.”
No, –you can’t convince a pregnant, starving woman that her baby will be loved by this world. This is why the people who allowed her to go hungry in the first place will bear the greatest blood guilt in the casual and horrifying equation of abortion-on-demand.
The final judgement of our souls will be an interesting group event. In the final analysis, I don’t think anybody will be actually surprised these days. The oceans of evidence that people are hypocrites threatens to overwhelm us these days. Jesus might have been considered horribly rude by the people he addressed in this morning’s gospel.
I don’t know why, but when people argue about abortion, I often think about a couple of realities that shook the foundations of my world when I was young:
1. The probability that *I* exist. One in how many trillions? “I carved you on the palm of my hand”–Who would dare mess with that?
2. That our understanding of what is sacred is not what makes it sacred. Nothing made that reality hit harder than reading a letter a missionary wrote to his superior about a tribe they he helped convert in South America. He had to convince an old woman who had ALREADY been converted to Christ that eating the babies of her enemies was not okay. There was a certain “delicacy” that she still yearned for.
I don’t care if people think that religion forms my ideas. No. It is true that sins we commit over and over again dull our ability to understand or see, but the natural law exists even in the furthest corner of the earth, and everybody knows abortion is wrong.