A Fulton County judge heard arguments Monday about the constitutionality of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, but a decision won’t come until after the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
The two-day trial will resume Tuesday at the Fulton County Courthouse with Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert CI McBurney presiding over the case. Prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to delay the hearing.
“I have set an aggressive timeline because this is an issue that needs to be addressed now, not three months from now. It probably needed attention three months ago, but here we are,” McBurney said.
Georgia’s 2019 law was on hold until the US Supreme Court heard Roe v. Wade lifted and thus set the course for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow state law to go into effect in July.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia filed a new lawsuit in July on behalf of abortion providers and advocates who argue that the law violates the state’s constitutional right to privacy and that lawmakers should start from scratch — and let voters have a say.
The law has drastically reduced the time frame for an abortion from about 20 weeks to about six weeks if the fetus’ heart activity can be detected. That’s before many women know they’re pregnant.
A few exceptions are allowed, including cases of rape or incest when a police report has been made, or a medical emergency that threatens the mother’s life.
Julia Kaye, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, argued in court that the law was far too restrictive. As an example, she cited the legislature’s decision to exempt a “life-threatening psychiatric emergency” from the medical emergency exception.
“The state says even if you commit suicide if you can’t complete that pregnancy, bad luck,” Kaye said.
Samantha Meltzer-Brody, who heads the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and specializes in reproductive psychiatry, testified Monday that treating psychiatric illness differently from medical emergencies is wrong.
“The idea that we exclude psychiatric illness, which is a medical illness, to me is just a tremendous injustice and will result in women dying,” Meltzer-Brody said.
Prosecutors called such examples “edge” scenarios and questioned the influence of factors such as a person’s distance from health services and the suicide rate among pregnant women.
“Just as we wouldn’t let anyone commit another crime to deal with their psychiatric problems, we won’t let them commit that particular crime because we think there are much better and different ways of solving this problem,” he said Attorney General Stephen Petrany.
The state is urging the judge to dismiss the case immediately. Petrany argued that there was no right to privacy since the embryo – which the legislature had granted personal status – was affected.
“There are many reasons why a data protection right might not be affected, but the only one that is absolutely clear is when it affects a third party, and that’s what the General Assembly has decided is that it affects a third party and they want it to be protect this third party. And for us, that’s really just the end of the case,” he said.
McBurney denied the plaintiffs’ earlier request to block the law, saying he was unable to do so.
The new abortion restrictions have proved unpopular with most Georgians. Almost 62% of respondents said they oppose the law according to a survey released this month. Black respondents were the most strongly opposed, with 86.4% of them saying they strongly disapproved of the law.
Democrats have taken up the issue in hopes of mobilizing their supporters to vote, while Republican officials have largely tried to avoid the issue during campaigns.
