Religious Women Win Injunction Against Indiana’s Abortion Ban

Arguments based on religious liberty have emerged as a central — and perhaps surprising — strategy to expand access to abortion in places where the procedure is criminalized. A recent Indiana decision granting a permanent injunction to certain religious plaintiffs illustrates the potential of these faith-based arguments, at least for a limited group.

Since the 1990s, statutory and judicial protections for religious liberty have expanded dramatically. Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Employment Division v. Smith, that cut back on existing protections, Congress in 1993 passed the Religious Freedom in Restoration Act (RFRA) to establish broader statutory protections for religious liberty. RFRA established that any governmental action that substantially burdened religious exercise violated the statute unless the government acted to advance a compelling interest and used the least restrictive means to achieve its goal.

Passing the law with near-unanimous support, Congress initially intended RFRA to apply to state and federal action. But in 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court, in City of Boerne v. Flores, narrowed its application to the federal government alone. Subsequently, states like Indiana sought to close the gap City of Boerne left. Today, 29 states have their own RFRAs, often in addition to robust religious liberty protections in their constitutions.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 held there was no federal constitutional right to abortion, reproductive rights lawyers sought to leverage this religious liberty expansion. This strategy has so far succeeded in the Indiana case, Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana v.Anonymous Plaintiff 1.

The case began in 2022 when a group of plaintiffs, including five anonymous women and a group called Hoosier Jews for Choice, challenged Indiana’s abortion ban under the state’s RFRA. The ban allows for abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or threats of “death or a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” The plaintiffs raised religious objections, articulating religious grounds for seeking access to abortion under certain circumstances. For example, one plaintiff, a Jewish woman, said she wished to have another child but has religious beliefs that would require her to terminate a pregnancy that endangered her physical or mental health. A second plaintiff, who does not belong to a particular religious tradition, asserted that she held spiritual and religious beliefs about autonomy and the beginning of life that would require her to terminate a pregnancy under certain circumstances, such as when the “birth of another child would not allow her to fully realize her humanity and inherent dignity.”

A trial court granted a preliminary injunction in December 2022, blocking enforcement of the state’s ban against these particular plaintiffs. The trial court also certified a class of those with similar religious commitments. An appellate court subsequently sustained those rulings but directed the trial court to clarify the preliminary injunction’s scope to only apply when the plaintiffs sought abortions for sincere religious reasons, not for reasons that did not implicate RFRA. The Indiana Supreme Court declined in December 2024 to review the intermediate court’s affirmance.

This month, the trial court made the injunction permanent. This means the state cannot deny abortions to the plaintiffs and others with sincerely held religious beliefs when they require them to seek the procedure. Because the plaintiffs’ counsel, the ACLU of Indiana, pursued a class action, the ruling will apply to all state residents with similar religious mandates.

In issuing the permanent injunction, the trial court first resolved questions related to standing and ripeness. The state defendants argued that Hoosier Jews for Choice didn’t have standing to pursue the RFRA claims of its members. The Indiana Supreme Court has not definitively resolved whether to recognize this kind of associational standing, the defendants pointed out.

But in affirming the plaintiffs’ entitlement to a preliminary injunction, the Indiana Court of Appeals embraced associational standing in its decision and set a standard for determining whether an organization may sue on behalf of its members, drawn from the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Commission: “Its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right,” “the interests it seeks to protect are germane to the organization’s purpose,” and “neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.” In affirming a preliminary injunction, the appellate court concluded that Hoosiers Jews for Choice met that standard. Marion County Judge Christina Klineman determined on remand that discovery the defendants had taken to try to discredit the group’s associational standing did not change that conclusion.

Klineman also agreed with the appellate court that other plaintiffs’ claims were ripe for litigation, even if they weren’t pregnant or immediately pursuing pregnancy. The judge stressed that the Indiana RFRA protected those whose religious freedom was likely to be substantially burdened, not just those who had already experienced harm. What was more, the plaintiffs had already rearranged their family planning decisions and intimate lives because of the abortion ban, the judge said.

The court then addressed whether Indiana’s law substantially burdened the plaintiffs’ religious exercise. Indiana argued that its ban didn’t impact women themselves because only providers faced criminal consequences. Klineman rejected this argument. The plaintiffs were unable to access abortion, Klineman reasoned, and the fact that a third party was likewise burdened didn’t change the analysis.

Indiana stressed that some plaintiffs — such as those concerned about a threat to their life or health — could successfully invoke the state’s medical exceptions. Therefore, it said, the plaintiffs had alternative ways to act on their religious beliefs short of requiring an injunction. Klineman reasoned that an injunction was needed for the “rare instances where an abortion does not fall within the enumerated exceptions but is likewise a necessary religious exercise.”

The state then argued that even if the ban burdened the plaintiffs’ religious exercise, it should be upheld because it was the least restrictive means available to achieve its compelling interest in protecting fetal life. Klineman found that the state had failed to prove that it had a compelling interest in protecting life, zeroing in on the inconsistent treatment of prenatal life in state law. The state exempted IVF embryos, for example, and allowed a plaintiff “to seek an abortion if her pregnancy were the result of rape, but not if it were mandated by her religious beliefs.” Klineman likewise reasoned that the state had less restrictive alternatives of pursuing its desire to protect prenatal life. The state had managed to accommodate that interest while carving out secular exceptions to the ban, for instance, for rape or threats of death, Klineman wrote. There was “no reason that the same accommodations could not be made with the conflict with RFRA.”

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has appealed the decision. Given the Indiana Court of Appeals’ decision upholding a preliminary injunction, Rokita is unlikely to succeed in the near term. Should the case go to the Indiana Supreme Court, the outcome is less certain: While that court declined to intervene in the case in 2024, four of the court’s five justices indicated that the case involved issues worthy of the court’s consideration, with three deciding it best to wait until later in the litigation to take on the questions presented in the case. Notably, the Indiana Supreme Court previously rejected a broader challenge to the state’s abortion ban, declaring the state constitution does not contain “a fundamental right to abortion in all circumstances.” However, the court held that the constitution protected “a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk.”

A number of state courts are considering similar religious liberty claims. The plaintiffs in Planned Parenthood Association of Utah v. State have argued that Utah’s abortion ban violates the state’s constitutional provisions on religious liberty. The Utah Supreme Court affirmed a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law on other grounds; litigation in the case continues. And in July 2025, a Kentucky appellate court ruled that Jessica Kalb, a Jewish woman, had standing to challenge that state’s abortion ban under its RFRA and state establishment clause. Kalb, who hoped to use one of her nine frozen embryos to have a second child through in vitrofertilization, had delayed because she was afraid of the effects of the state ban should she encounter a scenario where her religion would require her to terminate a pregnancy. Proceedings continue in the trial court.

Religious liberty litigation will, at most, modestly limit state abortion bans, given that not every abortion seeker will have a religious conviction at issue. There are also key unanswered questions about how patients with religious objections can exercise their rights in practice, even if they ultimately prevail in court. Nevertheless, the Indiana case is an important sign that such claims can be successful for plaintiffs whose conscience requires them to consider abortion.

Symbolically, the case and others like it serve as an important reminder that people of faith can be found on all sides of the nation’s abortion divide. And religiously motivated plaintiffs can establish that there are important limits on the state’s ability to criminalize abortion, especially for those whose deeply held beliefs would be the most burdened.

Mary Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California Davis School of Law.