US Supreme Court upholds Indiana law ensuring proper burials for deceased unborn infants

The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Denise Burke regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday on whether to weigh in on Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. The court decided to wait to address the constitutionality of an Indiana law that protects unborn children from lethal discrimination but upheld another Indiana law ensuring proper burials for deceased unborn infants:

“Indiana law helps ensure that deceased unborn infants receive proper burials—a law that the high court upheld. Tragically, many states do not ensure that the bodies of miscarried, stillborn, or aborted infants are treated with dignity. Unborn infants shouldn’t be disposed of as ‘medical waste’ when they die before birth, regardless of whether their deaths are spontaneous, accidental, or induced. Further, the broken bodies of aborted infants shouldn’t be exploited for scientific experimentation. Since the horrific 2015 revelations that Planned Parenthood harvested and sold the body parts of aborted infants—including brains, hearts, livers, lungs, and muscle tissue—it has become apparent that this must be addressed in state law. No incentive or needless opportunity should exist for such gruesome exploitation.

“Indiana law also sends a clear message that all victims of discrimination—born and unborn—are worthy of protection. We had hoped the Supreme Court would take this opportunity to revisit the 7th Circuit’s deeply flawed ruling, which endorses a lethal form of discrimination, as long as it occurs in utero. But we appreciate Justice Thomas’s assessment that, ‘Given the potential for abortion to become a tool of eugenic manipulation, the [c]ourt will soon need to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana’s…. Enshrining the constitutional right to an abortion based solely on the race, sex, or disability of an unborn child, as Planned Parenthood advocates, would constitutionalize the views of the 20th Century eugenics movement.’ It should be unthinkable for an expectant mother to face pressure to abort her baby simply because she is a girl, or because she may have a genetic abnormality like Down syndrome. No sensible person believes that aborting a baby for these reasons is legitimate, but Indiana’s law—which prohibits such death sentences for babies simply because of who they are—is entirely legitimate.”

In November, ADF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in partnership with the Radiance Foundation, an educational, nonprofit organization that, through journalism, multimedia presentations, and community outreach, is committed to empowering and motivating people to illuminate the inherent value of every human life, including racial minorities, women, and those with disabilities.

Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.