The mother, who said vaccines violate her religious beliefs, had asked the justices to intervene so she wouldn’t have to move to Florida to receive an exemption while her lawsuit continues.
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WASHINGTON – New York doesn’t have to let a kindergartener attend school while his mother challenges the state’s vaccination requirements, the U.S. Supreme Court said on Sept. 8.
The mother, who said vaccines violate her religious beliefs, had asked the justices to intervene so she wouldn’t have to move to Florida to avoid the rules while her lawsuit continues.
Lower courts ruled that the mother is unlikely to win her request for a religious exemption and declined to let her son enroll in a kindergarten in Eastchester, New York, for now.
The Supreme Court rejected her emergency appeal. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted her request.
The decision came as vaccines, which were a political minefield during the COVID pandemic, have again become controversial amid a measles outbreak and the Trump administration’s push for fewer childhood vaccinations.
Kindergartens have been getting vaccinated at lower rates since the pandemic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Child was previously vaccinated
The 5-year-old at the center of the Supreme Court appeal had previously received doses of some vaccines but needs additional doses to prevent polio, chickenpox and other diseases, according to officials at the Eastchester Union Free School District.
The mother, a practicing Catholic who is not identified by name in the court filings, said that would violate her faith. 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.”
Mom argued religious exemtions should be required
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.
A 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.
The mother also pointed to a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that backed parents’ religious rights in a case about LGBTQ+ storybooks used at school.
But months after issuing that decision, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal from a California parent who argued that opinion meant parents are entitled to a religious exemption from school vaccination requirements.
Some states have repealed religious exemptions
California stopped allowing nonmedical exemptions for religious and personal reasons from its school vaccination law after a 2014 measles outbreak.
New York repealed its religious exemption in 2019.
The state granted medical exemptions from vaccinations to 0.3% of kindergarteners last year, according to court documents.
The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this year rejected a challenge to New York’s vaccination requirement brought by Amish parents.
Lawyers for the school district said the mother in the current case was trying to pressure the Supreme Court “into issuing a rushed decision which would allow her child to violate a public-health measure that has withstood a very recent Constitutional challenge.”