The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a last-ditch, desperate challenge to Indiana’s abortion ban that was scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, August 1.
On Monday afternoon, the pro-abortion group, representing Planned Parenthood, filed with the state’s Supreme Court a “petition for rehearing” of the law.
The law was the first to be passed by any state following the momentous and life-saving decision by the Supreme Court of the United States last June. Called Senate Bill 1 (SB1), it was also the most restrictive, disallowing abortions with only the narrowest of exceptions.
Almost immediately the ACLU filed suit and shut down the new law while it wended its way through the court system. On June 30 this year, Indiana’s high court ruled that the abortion ban was constitutional, allowing it to go into effect on August 1.
That gave pro-life opponents such as Planned Parenthood a month to file any objections. It waited deliberately until the very last minute.
As a result the law, scheduled to become effective this week, has been delayed once again.
The outcome is scarcely in doubt. Even a legal analyst from ABC said that this will be an “uphill battle” for Planned Parenthood and its virtual legal partner, the ACLU. Said Gil Soffer:
Any petition for a re-hearing is by definition an uphill battle. A decision has already been reached, so the petition seeking a re-hearing has to make a strong case [as to] why it was wrong [and] what new facts or theories were not considered previously.
In fact, Planned Parenthood has stopped all four of its Indiana abortuaries from doing abortions, leaving them open to provide other “health services.” Two other abortion factories have closed. Estimates are that this will save between 5,000 and 10,000 abortion murders in Indiana every year.
To its discredit, Planned Parenthood has announced that one of its “health services” will be helping pregnant Hoosiers abort their children in nearby states that still allow the murders, namely Illinois and Michigan. Indeed, Planned Parenthood has even promised to use taxpayer funds to pay for transportation expenses to facilitate the murders in those nearby states.
In its plea to the state’s highest court to reopen the case, the ACLU reveals its utter contempt for human life. It wrote that “any harm to the State occasioned by allowing an injunction to temporarily remain in effect pending further proceedings is surely minimal when that injunction merely maintains the law as it has existed for more than half a century.” (Emphasis added.)
Surely minimal! The ACLU is referring to the deliberate and intentional convenience murdering of unborn children that will continue until it is blocked.
The attorney general of Indiana called the last-ditch effort to block the ban “groundless” and “exceedingly calculated,” a “transparent attempt” to keep the new law protecting the unborn from taking effect.
In his appeal to the federal Supreme Court, Indiana’s AG Todd Rokita wrote:
Plaintiffs’ invocation of Roe reveals what this case is about—whether “policy-making responsibility” for abortion should be vested in democratically accountable representatives or “our five-member, unelected Court, which does not have the institutional tools to discern Hoosiers’ divergent views on whether” and when abortion should be legal.
But Roe—an unprincipled exercise of “raw judicial power” by the U.S. Supreme Court [in 1973] that “has embittered our political culture for a half century”—provides a cautionary tale against exercising such raw power here.
The Court should not tolerate plaintiffs’ continued attempts to make the judiciary abortion policy czars.
It won’t take long for the highest court in the state to disregard the ACLU’s last-minute, last-ditch, desperate attempt to delay the inevitable and allow the ban against murdering unborn babies out of convenience to take effect.
