Protests held across region against Indiana abortion ban taking effect

For old friends JoAnn Mosby and Deb Rakers, the more things change the more they stay the same. The two were friends in high school and found themselves demonstrating for abortion rights in 1973 at age 20 in the lead-up to Roe v. Wade.

“Back then we were just in awe that the government would tell women they couldn’t do this,” said Mosby, who lives in Valparaiso. “What do you mean, if I was married I would have to get permission from my husband to get birth control?”

Fifty years later they’re still at it. “It just kind of always stayed in play,” Mosby added of the laundry list of women’s issues they’ve been keeping tabs on in the ensuing decades.

Across the region and across the state Monday evening, the Indiana National Organization for Women held vigils in support of abortion rights in advance of the state’s near-total ban on abortions slated to take effect Tuesday, though there was a glimmer of hope for reproductive rights supporters.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana asked the state’s high court Monday to keep Indiana’s near-total abortion ban on hold while it pursues a narrower preliminary injunction in a trial court to address the scope of the ban’s exemption allowing women facing serious health risks to obtain abortions.

The petition seeking a rehearing will delay the ban from taking effect while the Indiana Supreme Court considers the matter. The ACLU of Indiana’s request comes after the high court ruled on June 30 that Indiana’s Republican-backed ban doesn’t violate the state constitution.

Indiana’s six remaining abortion clinics — including the Merrillville Planned Parenthood location — have stopped providing abortions ahead of the state’s near-total abortion ban officially taking effect, clinic officials said Tuesday.

Planned Parenthood’s four Indiana abortion clinics stopped performing abortions Monday in accordance with state guidance that providers received in July alerting them that on or around Tuesday abortion would become illegal in Indiana in clinic settings “with really very, very limited exceptions,” said Rebecca Gibron, CEO of the Planned Parenthood division that includes Indiana. Indiana’s two other abortion clinics have also stopped providing abortions, with one calling it “a dark day for Indiana.”

Indiana became the first state to enact tighter abortion restrictions after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated federal protections by overturning Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Mosby and Rakers reconnected at the Valparaiso demonstration in 2021 commemorating the one-year anniversary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing. Monday evening they were again on the courthouse lawn in Valparaiso at the vigil put on by the Northwest Indiana chapter of NOW on the eve of the state’s abortion ban taking effect.

“We made the progress and it’s just one step forward and two steps back,” added Rakers, who lives in Burns Harbor.

Behind Mosby and Rakers, longtime NOW member and Chesterton resident Margaret Willis gave the crowd a history of reproductive rights in America. “It’s essential for us that we gather like this,” she said. “That we know that we’re not alone. We’re not a few. We’re the majority.”

A hefty police presence ensured there were no disturbances to the vigil, and there were no signs of opposition, either among the dozens of attendees or those driving by.

For its part, Porter County Right to Life issued the following statement regarding Tuesday’s change in abortion law in Indiana:

“We are thankful to the Supreme Court of Indiana for their decision to let our law stand. We pray for all the other states. Our work is not yet done. We will continue the fight for all life, from conception to natural death!”

Willis isn’t convinced. “When they claim to be protecting life, they only mean an embryo, not a woman, or her family,” she said after telling the crowd that the FBI says one in four American woman are the victims of rape or sexual assault, and that the leading cause of death of pregnant women is murder by their partners, or that the majority of the 17% of children living in poverty do so in maternal-supported households.

Mosby and Rakers held signs along the north sidewalk of the courthouse lawn cheering with dozens of others as semis and other vehicles honked their support on Lincolnway. Rainbow flags were in abundance, as was Kelly green, the color of global feminism and reproductive rights around the world.

But this vigil, while in solidarity with global women’s issues, was very much about local voices and their support of women’s reproductive rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.

“It brings home the idea that every community is impacted,” said Julie Storbeck, president of both the Indiana and Northwest Indiana Chapters of NOW. “Doctors are shutting down their practices because of these abortion bans,” she added, gesturing toward the surrounding streets. “We don’t go to the Statehouse to have our babies.”

Storbeck says she’s seen pictures of ERA author Alice Paul, who wrote the still-unratified amendment outlawing inequality on the basis of sex 100 years ago, working the phones well into her 90s. “And we are still not written into the Constitution,” she said. “It was not an oversight. I cannot believe, as of tomorrow, my daughter will have fewer rights than I had.”

Her daughter, Hannah Trueblood, is running as a Democrat for mayor of Valparaiso. Trueblood told those gathered that they must vote and they must elect candidates who are feminists, unlike current Republican city and state officeholders representing Valparaiso. “We’re literally losing our rights tomorrow,” she said.

In addition to Valparaiso, NOW held events in Michigan City, South Bend, Ft. Wayne, Indianapolis and Bloomington, as well as Crown Point.

Around 50 demonstrators attended the Crown Point demonstration in front of the old Lake County Courthouse on South Main Street. Participants voiced their frustration with a state legislature that they believe has turned its back on the interests of Hoosier women, their remarks punctuated by frequent honks of support from passing motorists.

“Indiana is brutal,” NOW member Rocky Davis, who helped organize the rally, told the Post-Tribune. “None of us want to go backwards. We don’t want to be treated like second-class citizens.”

Several signs and speakers invoked the symbolism of the coat hanger, calling to mind a pre-Roe era during which desperate women lacking access to legal abortions sometimes turned to dangerous and potentially deadly means of terminating a pregnancy.

“I marched in 1973 on this issue,” Pam Putzel told the crowd. “Here I am at the age of 73 and we’re still fighting the same ... battle. When will we be heard permanently? Women’s rights are everybody’s rights.”

Electoral action was the rally’s running theme. State Rep. Carolyn Jackson, D-Hammond, urged participants to turn out at upcoming elections and exert pressure on their elected officials.

“Voting is the best way to let your voices be heard,” she said. “Not just voting today or voting in November or in the primary and forgetting about what they’re doing on the day-to-day basis, but following them, asking questions, coming to the Statehouse.”

The event’s organizers distributed election guides, voter registration forms and absentee ballot applications alongside information on how to access the drugs necessary for at-home medication abortions.

The ACLU of Indiana, representing Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinic operators, had challenged the constitutionality of the abortion ban. A county judge later ruled that the ban likely violated the state constitution’s privacy protections.

But in its June ruling, the high court struck down the county judge’s injunction that has blocked a 2022 law’s restrictions banning the vast majority of abortions in the state since September.

In its decision, the court said that while the state constitution’s liberty clause “protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk, the provision does not protect a fundamental right to abortion in all circumstances.”

An exemption under the ban states that it is limited to circumstances in which an abortion is necessary “to prevent death or a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.”

In Monday’s petition for rehearing, the ACLU of Indiana wrote that the high court’s ruling had “left open the possibility that this constitutionally protected right ‘may be broader than the current statutory exception.’”

It’s unclear how long it may take the high court to decide the matter.

The Indiana Attorney General’s Office filed a response to the ACLU’s petition on Tuesday saying, “Artificially prolonging an erroneously issued injunction through an exercise of raw judicial power would contravene this Court’s precedents, subvert the purpose of preliminary relief, and undermine the democratic process,” according to court records.

The state’s ban will eliminate the licenses for all abortion clinics in the state and ban most abortions, even in the earliest stages of a pregnancy. It includes exceptions allowing abortions at hospitals in cases of rape or incest before 10 weeks post-fertilization. It also allows abortions up to 20 weeks to protect the life and physical health of the mother or if a fetus is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly.

Current Indiana laws generally prohibit abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy and tightly restrict it after the 13th week.

Indiana’s abortion ban also faces a separate court challenge over claims it violates the state’s 2015 religious freedom law signed by GOP then-Gov. Mike Pence. The state’s intermediate Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments in that case Dec. 6.

Shelley Jones is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.

adalton@chicagotribune.com

The Associated Press contributed.