People march on the street during a protest June 25 in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed an injunction to the state’s 2019 anti-abortion law, which bans most abortions after about six weeks, and ruled that the law is in full force.
Driving the news: “We are lifting the injunction, overturning the pro-abortion verdict, and remanding with orders to enter a verdict in favor of the state officials,” the court said Wednesday before staying the lower court’s decision, though plaintiffs still remain could request a reconsideration of the decision.
- In its ruling, the court cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, saying that “there is no reference to abortion in the Constitution and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision”.
Game Status: HB 481, the 2019 law, bans abortions once heart activity has been detected in an embryo – generally around six weeks before many people know they are pregnant.
- The bill provides exceptions for when a doctor deems a pregnancy “medically hopeless,” and for victims of rape and incest after reporting them to police, and only for fetuses less than 20 weeks old.
What you say: A joint statement from groups including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood Southeast called the court’s stay of the lower court’s ruling a “highly unorthodox action that will immediately put essential abortion treatment for patients beyond the earliest stages of pregnancy out of reach.”
- “Across the state, providers are now being forced to turn away patients who thought they had access to an abortion, immediately changing the course of their lives and their future,” the groups wrote.
- Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr confirmed in a statement, “Today our arguments prevailed, which means that the Eleventh Circuit Court allowed the LIFE statute of Georgia to go into effect immediately.”
Remarkable: The court also dismissed plaintiffs’ attempts to challenge the law’s “personality” provision, which defines an embryo as a “natural person.” There, an Arizona judge recently called a similar law “unconstitutionally vague.”
What’s next: Georgia’s abortion rights community has already weighed possible legal challenges to the anti-abortion law at the state level. Some have focused on protecting the right to privacy at the state level as a possible avenue.
- Don Samuel, an Atlanta attorney who has defended abortion rights in Georgia, said the ruling was “not surprising.” But he said there are still some outstanding issues in Georgia.
- He monitors whether lawmakers will seek a total abortion ban and whether there will be criminal contact with women in grayer areas of the law like the morning-after pill, IVF implications and traveling across state lines for an abortion.
- “It’s not like, ‘It’s all over, it’s all dark,'” Samuel told Axios. “It could get darker and it could get lighter. Voters have a lot of power.”
go deeper… Georgia’s abortion law explained
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with Information from a newly published submissionand statements from the ACLU and Planned Parenthood Southeast.
