Satanists Team Up With Planned Parenthood To Promote Abortion in Missouri
Satanists. Abortion. Planned Parenthood. Why on earth are these three things in the same sentence? It turns out they actually have an awful lot to do with each other, in Missouri at least, where Planned Parenthood have gained a strong ally in its quest to challenge what they consider to be restrictive abortion laws. Missouri has apparently doubled its abortion capacity this year “thanks to the Satanic Temple and Planned Parenthood,” who have worked together to fight the state’s restrictions on abortion.
Slate staff writer Christina Cauterucci on Tuesday linked the rise of abortion services in Missouri to recent court challenges to the state’s abortion laws by the Satanic Temple, a religion as well as a political activist organization based in Massachusetts.
Earlier this week the Temple argued — not for the first time — in Missouri courts that the state’s abortion laws ‘violate their members’ rights to free religious practice.’
This plays out at the same time as Planned Parenthood prepares to resume abortion services again at its midtown Kansas City clinic. They stopped offering abortions at this clinic about five years ago. Now however, the abortion giant has gained a strong – and some may say surprising – ally in its ongoing fight to dismantle the state’s abortion laws – Satanists. Missouri boosts some of the most clearly defined regulations on abortion in the United States, managing to lower the number of abortion facilities to a single clinic. Sadly though, the number of abortion providers in the state is now expected to jump from just one, in St. Louis, to five, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Planned Parenthood has in the past battled state regulations requiring doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges and clinics that provide abortions to meet standards set for outpatient surgical centres. The laws in this part of America are strikingly similar to the ones in Texas struck down last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, deemed unnecessary and unconstitutional.
Planned Parenthood took Missouri to court, and a federal judge sided with the group, blocking enforcement of the laws while at the same time citing the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision regarding Texas abortion laws. Following that, the federal court ordered the state Department of Health and Senior Services to issue licenses promptly for clinics in Kansas City, Columbia, Springfield and Joplin, according to the Tribune.
“Missouri’s recent stroke of good fortune in the reproductive rights realm may have to do with intervention from the fiery underworld,” Cauterucci wrote.
Cauterucci reports that challenges from the Satanists to Missouri’s abortion laws began two years ago when a pregnant member of the Satanic Temple from rural Missouri, called “Mary Doe,” tried to use a religious waiver to become exempt from two of the state’s abortion laws.
One of these laws requires patients to look at anti-abortion literature. The other requires a 72-hour waiting period between a patient’s first consultation with a doctor and her second appointment.
Doe decided to travel from Greene County in southwest Missouri to St. Louis in 2015 to have an abortion, giving a Planned Parenthood doctor a letter claiming a religious exemption to the 72-hour waiting period. The letter also informed the doctor that she would not look at a pamphlet claiming that life begins at conception and that abortion ends “the life of a separate, unique living human being.” When the doctor rejected the letter, the woman sued. The Satanists claimed in court that forcing members like “Mary Doe” to read “non-scientific” anti-abortion pamphlets and “consider a religious proposition with which they do not agree” was a clear violation of members’ rights to religious freedom. The Satanic Temple claimed that the laws violate two core pillars of its faith: that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone” and, “beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.”
The temple went on to file state and federal lawsuits, but a Cole County circuit judge threw out the case in December. He had come to the conclusion that a strong enough argument had not been made, according to St. Louis Public Radio.
The attorney general’s office argued in court documents that the judge was indeed correct to throw out the case because the law didn’t require “Mary Doe” to do anything other than hear information she didn’t agree with.
But that’s not the end of the story. The Satanic Temple is back in court this week. On Monday the state Court of Appeals began hearing arguments surrounding whether “Mary Doe” should have been allowed to opt out of the state’s 72-hour waiting period and its informed consent laws in the name of free religious practise. The appeals court will have the responsibility of deciding whether the lawsuit goes to trial.
The Satanic Temple has been on the front lines of the battle to protect and extend abortion rights throughout the US, and in 2015 it set up a crowdfunding website “to challenge arbitrary, insulting abortion regulations.”
It states on its website:
‘The Satanic Temple (TST) supports personal choice in the context of abortion and, as part of a multi-faceted Women’s Rights campaign, TST is offering religious exemptions from arbitrary, insulting, and outright harmful anti-abortion legislation that has been steadily encroaching across the nation.’
Many, particularly those who identify themselves as ‘pro-choice’ have met the news with shock and a sense of disbelief. Let us remember though, that Satanism has in fact a millennial history of association with child sacrifice, rendering the Temple’s strong financial, ethical and moral support of abortion, the effective sacrifice of an innocent child often for the sake of personal convenience and the God of self, a natural activity for the disturbing sect.