Indiana's law sought to ban abortions performed solely on the basis of the fetus' gender, race, ethnicity, or disabilities.

Lower courts had blocked enforcement of the law for violating a woman's right to abortion under privacy concerns within the Fourteenth Amendment, as previously found in the landmark cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

In more recent years, with the onset of the presidency of Donald Trump and his nominations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to replace Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, these laws have appeared designed to create a necessary legal vehicle to be heard by the Supreme Court as to challenge the long-standing provision of the 1973 landmark case Roe v. Wade.

This type of restriction was determined to be unconstitutional in the Supreme Court case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt that struck down a Texas law with these limits.

In the present case, the Republican-controlled legislation of Indiana passed House Bill 1337, a "Sex Selective and Disability Abortion Ban", and which was signed into law by Mike Pence in March 2016.

[3] Within weeks of passage, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc. (PPINK) sought a stay of the law from going into effect that July while they challenged it in court.

The Court issued a per curiam decision on May 28, 2019, in which it granted certiorari on the first question and overturned the stay on the fetal disposition clause, arguing that how the fetus is disposed has no impact on a woman's rights to an abortion.