Aug 4, 2005 / 22:00 pm
In a friend of the court brief, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold New Hampshire’s parental notification law.
The case, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, arose when lower courts overturned the New Hampshire statute because it did not contain a “health exception.”
The brief described the decision by the First Circuit as a “throwback” to an earlier time before the Supreme Court acknowledged in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that it had gone “too far” in striking down reasonable restrictions on abortion.
“Applying Casey and other precedent, this Court should reject the attempt to portray parental notice laws as creating a conflict between the rights of parents and the interests of their children,” reads the amicus brief, filed Aug. 4.