Do Missouri’s Abortion Laws Violate Satanic Religious Rights?

An atheist display at the Florida Capitol Rotunda in Tallahassee was damaged by an angry visitor.

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By Nathan Guttman January 24, 2018

Missouri’s strict abortion laws may have finally met their challenge. And it is coming from Satanic worshipers.

A woman going by the name “Mary Doe” filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Missouri’s supreme court, arguing that the state’s limitations on abortions violate her religious rights as a member of the Satanic Temple. She was referring to a new requirement imposed by the state on Planned Parenthood, which requires it to distribute a booklet claiming that “the life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”

The woman , according to the Washington Post, claimed that this runs counter to the tenets of her Satanic beliefs which stipulate that a woman’s body “is inviolable and subject to her will alone.”

The Satanic Temple was founded by atheists and does not believe in the literal Satan but rather in its role as an outsider. They’ve mounted several battles in cases questioning church and state separation and have gained national attention. In 2015, the group helped efforts to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the Oklahoma capitol ground after threatening to place next to it a statue of a a half-goat, hermaphroditic idol.

Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.