Pro-life attorney Harold Cassidy explained what is at stake in a federal court case involving three Minnesota women who sued Democratic Gov. Tim Walz after they were forced into having abortions.
Walz, the failed 2024 vice-presidential candidate, has come under scrutiny for signing two bills alleged to have effectively allowed coerced abortions in Minnesota.
“It’s a mother’s rights case, it’s a women’s rights case,” Cassidy said on a Thursday night webinar hosted by CatholicVote. He noted that it was “brought by three women subjected to abortions they did not want, as well as two pregnancy help centers.”
The case Women’s Life Care Center v. Ellison was recently filed in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota.
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In addition to Walz, the women also sued Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Walz administration Department of Human Services commissioner Jodi Harpstead, and multiple abortion facilities.
Cassidy called coerced abortion a “national scandal,” adding that the women “came forward to prevent other women from suffering the losses they’ve had.”
The attorney said that the case’s 240-page complaint represented a “massive indictment not just of Minnesota law and Walz but of Planned Parenthood and the entire abortion industry.”
Cassidy went on to share stories of some of the victims of coerced abortion in Minnesota.
One of the plaintiffs in the case was a 28-year-old woman living with a man 20 years her senior. The man forced her to sleep in a car until she agreed to abort her unborn child – in the middle of January in the northern state, where temperatures dropped to below freezing.
The woman ended up in the abortion facility crying. “They do the abortion anyway,” Cassidy said.
The lawyer then talked about one of the other plaintiffs, Alexandra Johnson, whose boyfriend “insisted she have an abortion.” She instead went to a pro-life pregnancy resource center (PRC), but her boyfriend still “dragged her to an abortion facility anyway.”
Cassidy finally shared the story of a 21-year-old woman who tragically took her own life by hanging herself from a ceiling fan after she was forced to abort her baby.
When her parents, who did not know she was pregnant, found her lifeless body, they read the note she had left: “Now, I can be with my unborn child.”
“Then they learned what had happened,” said Cassidy, referring to the late woman’s parents. “It’s time for the courts to hear this.”
Cassidy stressed that, contrary to a popular argument used by the abortion lobby, abortion is “not a medical procedure.”
“It’s not medicine,” he said. “It’s a way to terminate the mother’s relationship with the child.”
He pointed out that when a man brings a woman to get an abortion against her will, “There’s nothing standing between the man … and the abortion provider who has an objective of maximizing the number of abortions they sell in a single day.”
There are “83 documented cases where men murdered women because they refused to have an abortion,” Cassidy noted. He referred to the results of multiple recent studies which found that homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States.
“The other side for 50 years has called themselves the defenders of women’s rights,” Cassidy said. “They are the destroyers of women’s rights.”
He further added that per conversations he had with multiple former abortion workers: “They’re forbidden to tell a woman the truth.” Abortion facility employees are instead “instructed to tell the woman” that the unborn child is “just tissue.”
Planned Parenthood fired one of its workers after she gave a woman who did not want to go through with an abortion the phone number of a pregnancy resource center.
Cassidy noted that the abortion giant said of the employee they fired: “The information she gave was not in line with our values.”
40 Days for Life founder and former CEO David Bereit, who also spoke on the webinar, said that many in the pro-life movement did not expect that “we would still have this much work to do” after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
“We need to think differently and do some things differently to meet the challenges in this new landscape,” said Bereit, who converted to the Catholic faith in 2018.
Responding to his question as to why he filed the case in Minnesota, Cassidy told Bereit that the state’s abortion laws “are particularly offensive.”
“Under the law today in Minnesota, there is zero protection of the mother’s rights,” he explained. “There’s no requirement” that a doctor or nurse “make any disclosures of any kind.”
“The facts are on our side,” Cassidy said of the case. He added that the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit “is a particularly good circuit for us in the sense that they’re fair … They’ll hear us, they’ll listen to us. And that’s all we want.”
“We get a court to listen, we will win,” the lawyer stressed.
The 8th Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over Minnesota and is widely considered to be one of the more conservative appellate courts in the country.
Per Cassidy’s website, the New Jersey-based lawyer “is widely recognized as the leading attorney in the nation in protecting pregnant mothers against the excesses and abuses of an abortion industry which violates the rights and interests of the women of the nation.”
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
