The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to intervene in a lawsuit brought by a New York woman attempting to send her child to kindergarten without receiving state-required vaccinations.
The mother, only identified as Jane Doe, is seeking emergency relief as courts determine whether the state can legally deny religious exemptions to schoolchildren who haven’t received the vaccinations.
“Justices Alito and Gorsuch would have granted relief,” SCOTUS Wire noted.
The one-line order issued by the justices offered no explanation for the decision.
🚨 The Supreme Court has declined to let a New York child attend school without vaccinations required by state law while her mother’s religious-liberty challenge proceeds. Justices Alito and Gorsuch would have granted relief. pic.twitter.com/WkCNHVo8DD
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) September 8, 2026
The Hill shared further:
The mother has claimed that her Catholic faith precludes her from further vaccinating herself and her child, writing in a statement to the school in April that she believes it is a “genuine, serious sin.”
ADVERTISEMENTNew York eliminated its religious exemption to school vaccination requirements during a 2019 measles outbreak but continues to recognize medical exemptions, which Doe’s attorneys have argued infringes on her constitutional rights to direct her child’s religious upbringing.
Attorneys also stated that Doe faced “imminent forced relocation” to Florida if the justices did not step in because the state “provides no school-attendance route for a religiously objecting unvaccinated child.”
“A merits decision months later cannot reconstruct the beginning of a five-year-old’s kindergarten year,” they wrote in the application.
According to officials at the Eastchester Union Free School District, the five-year-old child had previously received doses of some vaccines but required additional doses of polio, chickenpox, and others to attend school.
The Supreme Court denied a New York woman’s bid to send her son to kindergarten without receiving state-required vaccines, in a case that highlights the limits of the court’s push to expand religious rights. https://t.co/sGj2B6hLz5
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 8, 2026
USA TODAY has more:
Her lawyers said her religious objection had not been fully formed when her son previously received childhood vaccinations.
While the Catholic Church has not challenged New York’s law, the mother said she now objects to vaccines because they inject “biological material derived from unclean sources directly into the bloodstream.”
“God created human beings in His image, distinct from all other creatures,” she said in a filing. “The mixing of human and animal blood material, human fetal cell lines combined with animal tissue violates this fundamental principle of God’s created order.”
The mother argues New York must allow religious exemptions to the vaccination requirement since the state allows exemptions for medical reasons. Under the court’s recent rulings about religious rights, her attorneys said in filings, governments can’t “treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James responded that the two exemptions aren’t comparable.
ADVERTISEMENTA medical exemption is “tightly constrained in both scope and duration, and it serves rather than undermines the law’s objective of protecting the health of schoolchildren,” she wrote in urging the court to reject the mother’s appeal.
