A federal appeals court has halted a lower court’s order requiring the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops disclose internal communication about abortion to a chain of reproductive clinics attempting to challenge a state law mandating fetal burial.
A ruling by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Sunday put a stop to a lower court judge’s order that the bishops group needed to disclose internal correspondence. On Monday, the trial began in a civil suit brought by the clinics against the state.
A religious liberty group is touting the ruling as a move that protects religious leaders from government overreach. One of the three jurists filed a dissenting opinion, upholding the order.
“Letting trial lawyers put religious leaders under constant surveillance doesn’t make sense for Church or State,” Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, a religious liberty firm based in Washington, D.C., said in a news release. “The Court was right to nip this abuse of the judicial process in the bud.”
The decision stems from a 2016 lawsuit against the state brought by Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of reproductive health centers headquartered in Austin, over a law that requires medical facilities to dispose of aborted fetal remains by burial or cremation. The clinics argued that the cost of this mandate violated patients’ rights to due process. The bishops were not party to the lawsuit but their group drew the interest of the health clinics after the bishops offered to allow burials in Catholic cemeteries
Lawyers for the clinics said the information request did not reflect hostility toward the Catholic bishops, but they wanted to know the extent of their support for the law.
“We just want them to be transparent,” said Stephanie Toti, with the Lawyering Project, one of the groups representing abortion clinics in the fetal burial case. “They claim that they are going to offer to facilitate compliance with this law but it’s not really clear that that’s true. We want the evidence. They say they’re going to make this commitment, but there’s no evidence that they actually intend to follow through on it, and that’s really what the discovery dispute is about.”
Whole Woman’s Health sought all communications among the bishops and between them and state officials regarding abortion. The bishops produced external communication but argued that the request for internal documents was “unduly burdensome” because it violated their freedom of speech and the right to religious freedom.
A magistrate judge in the Western District of Texas ordered the bishops to release the documents, and a district judge later upheld that finding.
Read the full story at the Houston Chronicle
