WASHINGTON, DC— Americans United for Life (AUL) filed a friend of the court brief today in the U.S. Supreme Court in Box v. Planned Parenthood, one of three pending abortion cases, urging the Court to hear and uphold Indiana’s parental notice of abortion law in the Fall. A peer-reviewed statistical study published in the American Journal of Public Health suggested that many young women might be positively influenced by a parental notice law by reducing adolescent abortions and births. The study found that a parental notice law in Minnesota decreased adolescent abortions and births, with the implication that it did so by decreasing adolescent pregnancies. Clarke Forsythe, Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life, released the following statement:
Indiana’s law is necessary to protect parental rights as well as to protect young women’s health by reducing adolescent pregnancy, abortion and birth. This appeal is urgent because the law was passed by the Indiana House & Senate in 2017 and has been on hold for nearly four years by a federal court injunction that never should have blocked the law from taking effect. This baseless attack by Planned Parenthood threatens the parental notice or consent protections passed by Indiana and many other states. Indiana’s case is also urgent because, as the lower courts acknowledged—and many federal judges have suggested—the Supreme Court’s abortion doctrine is confused. It has been unsettled by conflicting Supreme Court decisions issued by a sharply divided Court over the past three decades.
This is the latest example of the problem that Justice Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, has warned of: ‘We are responsible for the confusion among the lower courts, and it is our job to fix it.’
Americans United for Life (AUL) is a nonprofit, public-interest law and policy organization that holds the distinction of being the first national pro-life organization in America—incorporated in 1971. It protects and defends human life from conception to natural death through vigorous legislative, judicial, and educational efforts.
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