Through prior court rulings and legislative actions, Minnesota has among the most accommodating laws granting access to abortion. A lawsuit filed late last week in federal court seeks to upend those laws.

It was brought by a group of plaintiffs that includes women who have had abortions they say weren’t voluntary, anti-abortion organizations and “crisis pregnancy centers,” which counsel clients against having abortions. They argue that Minnesota’s process for abortion consent is too loose and that its legal protections for medical providers are too lenient.

For decades, New Jersey-based attorney Harold Cassidy has brought lawsuits on behalf of people who he has said “regretted having abortions.”

He said Minnesota is in violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment because the state — acting in concert with abortion providers — illegally terminated the pregnant person’s parental rights through involuntary and unwanted abortions...

...ill Hasday, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Minnesota Law School, said during an interview Monday on Minnesota Now that the plaintiffs want abortion to be treated as a termination of parental rights, rather than a medical procedure, and therefore subject to the same rules and regulations.

“The plaintiffs in the suit want to argue that the same constitutional requirements have to apply to abortion and that Minnesota’s laws legalizing abortion are unconstitutional because they permit the termination of parental rights before a child is born, without a court hearing, and without a court finding clear and convincing evidence of abuse and neglect.”