The following comes from a Feb. 19 story on Life Site News.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit brought by a Texas abortion provider against Catholic bishops who had offered to bury aborted babies free of charge.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops, the high court declined to hear a case that sought to force the bishops to release decades of internal religious documents regarding abortion.

“Thank goodness the Supreme Court saw this appeal for what it was: a nasty attempt to intimidate the bishops and force them to withdraw their offer to bury every child aborted in Texas,” said Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops in the case.

Whole Woman’s Health was challenging a 2-1 majority ruling by a panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that had rejected the abortion provider’s request for thousands of pages of the Catholic bishops’ internal communications regarding the burial of aborted babies’ remains. The ruling affirmed that burying fetal remains is constitutional and that the request for the Church records amounted to intimidation.

“The First Amendment expressly guarantees the free exercise of religion — including the right of the Bishops to express their profound objection to the moral tragedy of abortion, by offering free burial services for fetal remains.”