While the Supreme Court declined to block a stringent new Texas abortion law from going into effect, the Salem-based Satanic Temple is taking its own approach to help people end pregnancies if they choose to do so.
The religious group said in an Aug. 31 letter to the Food and Drug Administration that abortion is part of a religious ritual, and preventing access to treatments that can terminate pregnancies violates religious freedom.
As such, the group claims its members should have access to mifepristone and misoprostol, two drugs that can end pregnancies, without being subject to their regulations.
“[The Satanic Temple’s] membership uses these products in a sacramental setting,” a lawyer for the group told the FDA. “The Satanic Abortion Ritual is a sacrament which surrounds and includes the abortive act. It is designed to combat feelings of guilt, doubt and shame and to empower the member to assert or reassert power and control over their own mind and body.”
Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple does not worship the devil. Rather, it argues for the separation of church and state and views Satan as rebellious figure.
Texas’ abortion law, which went into effect Sept. 1, outlaws abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. This usually occurs around six weeks into a pregnancy — before most women know they’re pregnant.
The Satanic Temple says the law violates its member’s First Amendment freedom to conduct a ritual in accordance with its religion. Additionally, the group says Texas’ other regulations governing abortion, such as forcing a woman considering an abortion to undergo an ultrasound, are medically unnecessary and interfere with the religious ritual. The group is suing Texas over these rules, it says.
“I am sure Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — who famously spends a good deal of his time composing press releases about religious liberty issues in other states — will be proud to see that Texas’s robust Religious Liberty laws, which he so vociferously champions, will prevent future Abortion Rituals from being interrupted by superfluous government restrictions meant only to shame and harass those seeking an abortion,” Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves said in a statement on the lawsuit.
In the Satanic Temple’s letter to the FDA, Matthew Kezhaya, the group’s lawyer, proposed a system in which a member could confer with a doctor on whether it would be safe to use abortive drugs before going to the temple to access the products.
By this method, Kezhaya said, members could avoid the burden of obtaining a prescription. He gave the FDA 60 days to respond, telling the federal body he was instructed to file a lawsuit if he did not hear back in that amount of time.