Refusal of Care Laws Put Providers’ Personal Beliefs Ahead of Patient Well-Being

April 3, 2026
National Women’s Law Center

Health care is a basic human right, and everyone deserves access to the care they need. Yet across the nation, health care facilities and providers are refusing to give patients care, information, and referrals based on personal objections rather than patient needs. State and federal laws – known as refusal laws – allow such refusals, emboldening hospitals and individual health care providers to use personal beliefs to deny patients’ care, even if their refusals result in harm to patients.

Continued: https://nwlc.org/resource/refusal-of-care-laws-put-providers-personal-beliefs-ahead-of-patient-well-being/

Viewing abortion rights through the lens of religious liberty is revealing

by Andrew Koppelman
Oct 8, 2024

A recent court case about religious liberty helps to show the moral case for a right to abortion.

Abortion bans often have exceptions for rape, incest and lethal fetal defects. These exceptions presuppose that in some cases, the suffering of pregnant women matters enough to outweigh whatever rights a fetus may have. In its recent rulings on religious liberty, the Supreme Court has said that states can’t treat religious reasons any worse than comparable secular reasons for wanting legal exceptions to broadly applicable laws.

Continued: https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4920547-viewing-abortion-rights-through-the-lens-of-religious-liberty-is-revealing/

USA – Abortion concerns once delayed a major religious freedom law. Now, they’re back in the spotlight

Do religious exercise rights protect access to abortion? Courts have been asked to decide

By Kelsey Dallask
Nov 25, 2023

On Sept. 18, 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee and dozens of invited guests gathered to consider, among other things, the link between religious freedom and abortion.

The focus of the hearing was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill designed to restore religious exercise protections that recently had been severely limited by the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/25/23960097/abortion-religious-freedom-restoration-act

USA – The Satanic Abortion Clinic That’s Pissed Off Pretty Much Everyone…and Might Beat the Bans Anyway

At first glance, The Satanic Temple’s new telehealth venture, named after Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr.'s mom, seems like a social experiment in trolling. But as Cosmo reports, the fully credentialed clinic is serving real patients and has a real chance of breaking the religious right’s grip on abortion law.

BY ARIELLE DOMB AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOE LINGEMAN
Nov 14, 2023

Rose Fradusco Alito gave birth on April Fool’s Day, 1950. Hundreds of women would die that year from botched illegal abortions in the United States, where the procedure had been widely banned for decades. But here in the Alito household in suburban New Jersey, all was grand. Rose thrilled at new motherhood. She was a schoolteacher, then a principal. Her husband Sam was a teacher too, then a director in state government. Their son, named after his father, would go on to do important things someday; Rose could feel it. When she died in 2013, Samuel Alito Jr. was all grown up, with a big fancy job on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a45613416/satanic-group-abortion-clinic-samuel-alito-mom/

A legal scholar sizes up the religious argument against abortion bans

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
JULY 9, 2023

(JTA) — The abortion debate is often portrayed as a clash between religious beliefs on the pro-life side and secular or humanist convictions on the pro-choice side. Indeed, lawmakers and activists have often invoked God in enacting state bans on abortion since the Supreme Court, in last year’s Dobbs decision, struck down a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.

Some clergy and faith groups, however, including a number of Jews, are pushing back. In efforts to overturn these restrictions, they have been pressing a legal strategy claiming that abortion bans violate their religious liberty. In Kentucky, a case brought by three Jewish women argues that the state’s near-total abortion ban violates their religious beliefs about when life begins and protecting a mother’s life. In Indiana, a suit brought by Hoosier Jews for Choice and four women who represent a variety of faiths demands exemptions from the state’s abortion ban for people whose religions support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.jta.org/2023/07/09/ideas/a-legal-scholar-sizes-up-the-religious-argument-against-abortion-bans

USA – The sleeper legal strategy that could topple abortion bans

Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
06/21/2023

WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468

USA – Meet the Religious Crusaders Fighting for Abortion Rights

Christian conservatives worked to topple Roe. Can members of different faiths save abortion access?

ABBY VESOULIS, Mother Jones
FEBRUARY 17, 2023

The Torah tells its followers to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” so that’s what Lisa Sobel, a devout Jewish woman from Louisville, Kentucky, set out to do.

It wasn’t easy. First, she endured three years of infertility. Then, she and her husband embarked on a $50,000 in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey, during which they had to discard four embryos before implantation because of genetic abnormalities. Finally, in April 2019, Sobel delivered a healthy baby girl. Immediately after, she began hemorrhaging and almost died.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/religious-clergy-fighting-for-abortion-rights/

History shows that the First Amendment should protect abortion

Antiabortion activists have long sought to prevent this.

Perspective by Rachel Kranson
May 12, 2022

A leaked opinion revealed that the Supreme Court is potentially poised to reverse the long-standing legal precedent that established a constitutional right to abortion under the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy. That has left champions of abortion rights wondering about other legal avenues that could ensure reproductive freedom. Might the Constitution guarantee abortion access as a First Amendment, religious right?

Many Americans are surprised by the notion that a religious tradition could permit or even mandate the termination of a pregnancy. They assume all religions endorse the conservative Christian view that life begins at conception, rendering abortion akin to murder.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/05/12/first-amendment-could-save-abortion-rights/

12.05.2022

14th Amendment

American Civil Liberties Union

Burwell v. Hobby Lobby

First Amendment

Henry Hyde

National Council of Jewish Women

National Right to Life Committee

Rachel Kranson

Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

religious freedom

Religious Freedom Restoration Act

right to privacy

Roe v. Wade

U.S. Supreme Court

USA – Legislative Lowlights: Lawmakers in Ten States Have Introduced ‘Heartbeat’ Bans This Yea

Legislative Lowlights: Lawmakers in Ten States Have Introduced ‘Heartbeat’ Bans This Year

Feb 11, 2019
Brie Shea

Rewire.News tracks anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ legislation as it works its way through state legislatures. Here’s an overview of the bills we’re watching.

Arkansas and Tennessee lawmakers are planning for the fall of Roe v. Wade, Republicans in multiple states are still obsessed with bathrooms, and legislators in at least ten states have introduced measures this year to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat has been detected.

continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/02/11/legislative-lowlights-ten-states-introduced-heartbeat-bans/

Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

Leaked Draft of Trump’s Religious Freedom Order Reveals Sweeping Plans to Legalize Discrimination

If signed, the order would create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity.
By Sarah Posner
Feb 1, 2017

A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination.

The four-page draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held for-profit corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare; earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others; receiving government grants or contracts; or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments.”

[continued at link]
Source, The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/leaked-draft-of-trumps-religious-freedom-order-reveals-sweeping-plans-to-legalize-discrimination/