Federal lawsuit seeks to overturn Minnesota abortion protections

ST. PAUL, Minn. — A St. Paul-based crisis pregnancy center and a national anti-abortion organization are part of a group that has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Minnesota’s laws protecting abortion rights.

In 2023, Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers and Gov. Tim Walz passed laws to shore up state abortion protections in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade the year before.

The laws included a measure to codify into law the 1995 state Supreme Court decision Doe v. Gomez, which guaranteed the right to an abortion in Minnesota. They also removed restrictions including a 24-hour wait period, parental disclosure requirement and legal vestiges of a ban on abortions later in pregnancy — which had long been overturned by a court.

In a lawsuit filed last week in Minnesota U.S. District Court, the Women’s Life Care Center, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, and others argue Minnesota’s protections for abortion violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as it “is not medical treatment.”

They argue the laws violate “pregnant mothers’ intrinsic right to maintain their constitutionally protected relationship with their children, their right to procreate, their interests in their children’s lives and welfare.”

Further, they claim mothers who obtain abortions are not given informed consent. The lawsuit names state officials, as well as the regional Planned Parenthood organization and the Red River Woman’s Clinic in Moorhead, Minn.

Asked by a reporter about the lawsuit in an unrelated Monday news conference, Attorney General Keith Ellison said he didn’t have much to share, other than that he didn’t think it was likely to prevail.

“I have read the complaint, and we’re going to respond to it in accordance with federal and state law,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a very meritorious lawsuit.”

In addition to Women’s Life Care Center, the Minot, N.D., crisis pregnancy center Dakota Hope Clinic and mothers who had abortions in Minnesota signed on to the lawsuit. Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations that offer health care services like ultrasounds to pregnant women but urge against having abortions.

The 14th Amendment has increasingly featured in anti-abortion advocates’ arguments in the years following the end of Roe v. Wade. Though those arguments have often centered around fetal personhood, legal scholars such as University of California-Davis’ Mary Ziegler have observed.

In 2023, a letter published in the conservative magazine National Review signed by leaders of numerous organizations describing themselves as pro-life called for the anti-abortion movement to view the issue of unborn rights through the lens of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment.

And this year, the Republican Party adapted its platform to frame the abortion issue in terms of equal protection under the law guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and that states are allowed to pass laws protecting those rights.

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