(LifeSiteNews) — Planned Parenthood has taken its case against Nevada’s parental involvement law to the state’s highest court, pushing for the measure to be blocked despite such laws helping to stop sexual abuse. 

Nevada’s 1985 law requiring parental notification for minors’ abortions has never been enforced during its time on the books, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling that restored states’ ability to fully legislate abortion for themselves prompted the start of a legal bid to restore it. In April 2025, U.S. District Court Judge Anne Traum ruled that the law could take effect.

So Planned Parenthood changed tactics, withdrawing its federal challenge and instead attempting a state-level lawsuit, arguing the law lacks adequate clarity on how doctors would determine an abortion seeker’s parents’ last known address and, allegedly, that it is “fundamentally unclear how any patient seeking a judicial bypass order may practically do so across the state of Nevada at this time.”

Courthouse News Service reports that oral arguments began this month before the Nevada Supreme Court, during which Planned Parenthood attorney Valentina De Fex reiterated those arguments, as well as claimed that a 1991 ruling that the law was unconstitutional was “final,” and therefore the law can never be enforced unless the legislature enacts it anew, regardless of Dobbs.

Heidi Stern of the Nevada Attorney General’s Office countered that her office had no intention of prosecuting doctors and that courts could define legal meanings to standard terminology to account for vagueness claims. But in their questioning, the justices seemed receptive to De Fex’s arguments, from how much had to pass to trigger the law’s judicial bypass provisions, to exactly how much a doctor must proactively do to fulfill the requirement to send notification through certified mail.

Potentially complicating the eventual legal outcome even further is the so-called “Reproductive Freedom Amendment” that cleared a first vote in 2024 and must pass once more this fall to be added to the state constitution. It establishes a state-level so-called “constitutional right” to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including, without limitation, prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, vasectomy, tubal ligation, abortion, [so-called] abortion care, management of a miscarriage and infertility care.”

It allows abortion to be “regulate(d)” after fetal viability, albeit with the exception of any abortion claimed to be “necessary” for the mother’s “life or physical or mental health,” a loophole that would render any ban effectively meaningless. It would also establish that the state could not “penalize, prosecute or otherwise take adverse action” against individuals for “actual, potential, perceived or alleged outcome of the pregnancy of the individual, including, without limitation, a miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion.” The language does not explicitly rule out parental notification, but pro-lifers fear it will be interpreted as doing so by judicial activists.

Though commonly opposed by the abortion industry and its activist allies, parental involvement rules for underage abortions stop the practice from being used by sexual abusers to cover up and continue their crimes, as is often the case — sometimes with the knowledge and cooperation of Planned Parenthood staffers, as established by undercover investigations by the pro-life group Live Action.

Thirteen states have banned all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby continues to work feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.