The Left’s War on Parental Rights Reaches the Supreme Court – ACLJ Defends Parental Rights

The ACLJ has just filed a friend-of-the-court brief in what could be a blockbuster parental rights case, International Partners for Ethical Care (IPEC) v. Ferguson. The case turns on the legal concept of “standing,” which may sound technical but in reality draws the important dividing line between those who can sue in federal court and those who cannot. Under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, federal courts have the power to hear “cases” – actual legal disputes – but not to give merely advisory opinions. To sue in federal court, a person must either face or have faced some legal “injury.”

The IPEC case asks the fundamental question: What counts as an “injury” to parents that can be litigated in federal court? At issue is a Washington state law that keeps parents in the dark if their minor children run away from home and end up at a licensed homeless shelter. As the parents suing in IPEC put it, “[T]his amended statute allows shelters and homes to keep children at locations without their parents’ knowledge and refer those children for health interventions without their parents’ knowledge or approval.” The parents are suing because they rightly fear their children, some of whom are troubled, could run away and, under the Washington law, parents would not be told their child had turned up at a licensed shelter. Worse, their children could be given certain “treatments” (including “reproductive health care,” often code for abortion) without parental knowledge or consent.

Bizarrely, the federal appeals court hearing the case said the parents suffered no legal injury. According to that court, the parents only claimed that their children “may someday” run away and be kept hidden from the parents. The court said such speculation – “‘ifs’ and ‘shoulds’” – was not enough.

This is nonsense.

We write:

Protecting a child from harm, it should go without saying, includes preventing a child from encountering a future harm. Susie may not get injured in a car crash just because she rides with an inebriated driver. Johnny may not get addicted just because he goes to an unsupervised party with drug-using friends. But parents wisely forestall possible harms by holding their children back from hazardous situations. Yet if the government were to create those hazards, or disable parents from keeping their children out of harm’s way, that would be a serious violation of parental rights.

As we explain on page 1 of our brief:

The Ninth Circuit ruled that parents lack standing to challenge the imposition of a serious threat of harm to their children because the harm may not ever come to fulfillment. But the constitutional right to care for and protect one’s children includes the right to protect children from government-created risks of harm, not just the completed harms themselves. The government creation of a minefield, open to children without parental knowledge or consent, itself constitutes an Article III injury to parental rights, even if the children successfully navigate around or through the field without blowing up.

We continue:

Parents face immediate injury to their right to care for their children when the state opens the doors to disaster, leaves those doors open for children to enter, and keeps parents in the dark.

We believe the federal appeals court’s opinion.

conflates two distinct injuries to parental rights: first, the present subjection of a child and the child’s parents to a hazard; and second, the actual coming to fruition of the danger the hazard poses.

The first injury – subjection of children (and their parents) to a hazard – is not a matter of “‘ifs’ and ‘shoulds,’” as the court below put it. . . . It is a current, active injury.

Thus:

A government agency that offers pornography, abortions, or drugs to minors interferes with parental rights regardless of whether children actually take the bait.

We conclude:

The government injures parental rights by creating that risk of harm, and by expressly obstructing parental knowledge and consent regarding that risk. That government-engineered injury suffices for purposes of Article III standing. To hold otherwise would be to leave parents helpless to challenge threats to the welfare of their children – until it is too late.

IPEC is just the latest in a line of cases where the ACLJ has weighed in to support parental rights. We have pressed for parents’ rights to choose an education that best comports with their values in the Supreme Court cases of Trinity Lutheran Church, Espinoza, and Carson. And we recently filed in support of parental rights in the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud case, where the public school system sought to usurp and override parental instruction of children on highly sensitive issues.

I am happy to report that the parents won in each of those cases. Unfortunately, those who view parents as obstacles to their vision of childrearing seem in no hurry to go away. We thank God for those parents who have the courage to stand up in court against the opponents of parental rights.

The Supreme Court will hear oral argument in IPEC on December 7, 2026, and will likely issue a decision sometime in the first half of 2027.