Indiana Court Rules Abortion is a Legally-Protected Religious Practice

For years we’ve been told to cool it with the comparisons of abortion to ancient paganism. But now, an Indiana judge has ruled that abortion is a legally-protected religious ritual.

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by Jeff Maples
March 29, 2026

For years now, we’ve been told to cool it with the comparisons of abortion to ancient paganism. Stop invoking Molech. Stop talking about sacrifice. Stop saying that modern society is quietly reenacting the most perverse rituals of the ancient world. We’re told, even by our church leaders, that it’s “rhetorical excess” from people who take the Bible too seriously and modernity not seriously enough.

And yet here we are. A judge in Indiana has now ruled that there can be a religious right to abortion. Not metaphorically or rhetorically. Not even as a philosophical analogy.

Literally.

In a March 5 order out of the Marion Superior Court (pasted below), Judge Christina Klineman granted summary judgment to a group of plaintiffs—two anonymous women and an advocacy group called “Hoosier Jews for Choice.”

Their argument was simple and impudent. Indiana’s abortion restrictions violate the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because their religious beliefs require access to abortion in certain circumstances. The judge agreed and issued a permanent injunction preventing the state from enforcing portions of its abortion law against members of the plaintiff class when abortion is claimed as a religious exercise.

The court concluded that abortion can qualify as an exercise of religion, and therefore the state may not prohibit it if doing so would substantially burden that religious practice.

One plaintiff testified that her religious belief is that life begins at first breath and that Jewish law requires abortion when the physical or mental health of the mother is threatened. Another claimed a spiritual belief rooted in something like a cosmic collective consciousness — a kind of vague New Age metaphysics — which she says gives her a religious obligation to maintain bodily autonomy, including the right to terminate a pregnancy.

The court took those claims at face value.

Because Indiana’s RFRA bars the government from substantially burdening a person’s religious exercise unless the state can prove a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means, the judge concluded that the abortion ban could not stand in those situations.

And there it is. The quiet admission.

For decades, critics of abortion have said the practice functions like a religion — complete with sacred language, sacred rites, sacred defenders, and a priesthood of professionals who administer the sacrament. We were told that was overheated rhetoric.

Now a court has effectively confirmed it.

Abortion is a religious act.

The ancient world would understand this perfectly.

In the Old Testament, the worship of Molech involved the ritual killing of children. It was presented as devotion, as necessity, as a transaction with a higher moral order. Parents surrendered their offspring on the altar of a god that promised security, prosperity, stability — some version of a better future purchased with the blood of the next generation.

Sound familiar?

The modern version just looks cleaner. No bronze statue heated with fire. No drums beating to drown out the cries of the infants.

Instead, we have courtrooms, sterile clinics, legal briefs, and judges solemnly declaring that “terminating a pregnancy” can be part of someone’s religious life.

The altar has changed. The theology hasn’t.

And the social logic is exactly the same. Children are sacrificed so that adults can preserve their autonomy, their comfort, their plans. In the modern West, motherhood has been recast as an obstacle — a detour from career trajectories, personal fulfillment, travel plans, professional ambitions. The language used to justify abortion often circles around the same theme. This child would interfere with the life I want to live.

So the child goes and the world keeps spinning.

And society barely notices.

That might be the most chilling part of all this. Not the ruling itself, but the collective shrug that surrounds it. Forty years ago something like this would have detonated like a bomb in the public square. Today it barely registers as a blip on the news cycle.

We have become accustomed to it. The sacrifice has been normalized. Institutionalized. Litigated. Even celebrated.

The judge’s reasoning, though dressed in legal language, reveals the strange moral terrain we now inhabit. The court argued that the state’s interest in protecting prenatal life isn’t fully compelling because the law already contains exceptions — rape, incest, certain medical circumstances — and because Indiana law doesn’t explicitly define embryos or zygotes as human beings.

In other words, because the law doesn’t protect unborn life in every possible situation, the court concluded the state’s interest in protecting that life cannot be compelling enough to override religious claims.

That reasoning is very disturbing, and demonstrates the shortfalls of the mainstream pro-life movement, which seeks to regulate, rather than abolish abortion completely. It illustrates the need for the Church to make the case that the unborn child is a person, deserving of equal protection under the law as any other person.

So legally speaking, this fight isn’t over.

Not even close.

But culturally, the trajectory is hard to ignore.

This ruling didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the product of decades of moral drift, decades of reengineering the public conscience until something that once horrified the human heart now feels routine. Courts do not create cultural revolutions—they ratify them.

Which means the deeper problem isn’t the judge in Indiana.

It’s the civilization that produced the lawsuit.

We are living in a moment where child sacrifice can be reframed as spiritual devotion, where autonomy has become the highest good, and where the destruction of the unborn can be baptized in the language of religious freedom. And that’s not a legal anomaly. It’s a moral diagnosis.

And it explains why so many of these battles now feel like playing defense in a collapsing structure. The laws change and the courts waffle. The arguments evolve. But the deeper current keeps moving in the same direction.

Away from life.
Away from truth.
Away from the God who created both.

Which is why Christians cannot place their hope in courts or legislatures alone. Those things are important, of course — they restrain evil, they shape public order — but they cannot heal a civilization that has forgotten the most basic truth about human life.

Only Christ can do that.

Because the gospel does something the courts never can.

It exposes the darkness, calls people to repentance, and replaces hearts of stone with hearts that actually love life.

And until that happens on a broad scale, things like this will keep coming.

More creative.

More brazen.

More openly religious in their defense of the ancient practice we thought civilization had left behind.

Turns out we didn’t leave it behind at all. We just gave Molech a law degree.

Proposed Order 3

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— This article first appeared at The Disntr, which you should follow.

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