A judge in Georgia’s Fulton County on Monday overturned the state’s six-week abortion ban, allowing the procedure to go ahead and do just that. Legal up to 22 weeks pregnancy.
The state lawKnown as the LIFE Act, it was signed into law by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019, but after facing legal challenges and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. It didn’t go into effect until July 2022, after Wade withdrew his case.
“A review of our superior courts’ interpretations of “liberty” shows that liberty in Georgia includes a woman’s right to control its meaning, protection, and package of rights,” Justice Robert McBurney wrote in his ruling Monday. to decide over one’s body, what happens to it, and to reject government interference in one’s health care choices.”
“This power, however, is not unlimited,” McBurney continued. “When the fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – can society intervene.”
The judge wrote that the law’s fundamental change to previous state law “is an extreme narrowing of the window of time during which women have a legal opportunity to terminate a pregnancy by approximately twenty weeks (ieviability) for as little as six weeks, a point at which many, if not most, women are completely unaware, or at best unsure, that they are pregnant.
The case arose out of a lawsuit filed by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and other plaintiffs shortly after Kemp signed the law into law in 2019. Faced with legal trouble, McBurney ruled in 2022 that year that the law violated the U.S. Constitution and repealed it. But the Georgia Supreme Court soon heard the case and allowed it to stand.
The job was sent back to McBurney, who found the law unconstitutional.
“[D]Does Georgians’ right to privacy include the right to make decisions about personal health? It is obvious,” the judge wrote.
He said the record in the case is clear that “for many women, their pregnancies were unexpected, unexpected and often unknown until the embryonic heartbeat began. However, because of the rigors of the LIFE Act, it is too late: these women are now prohibited from terminating their pregnancies. a life-changing change in circumstances—before they know the change has happened.”
“Freedom of privacy for these women means that it is up to them to choose whether or not to serve as human incubators for the five months until they reach viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge or a commander. The Handmaid’s Tale telling these women what to do with their bodies during this time when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb, giving up their kidneys for their benefit, as much as society may or may not force them to serve as human tissue banks. someone else,” the judge wrote.
McBurney also took aim at a section of the law that gives district attorneys access to the health records of women who have had abortions in their counties.
The Act does not define “health records”. There is no explanation of the means by which the district attorney obtained such records: warrant, subpoena, subpoena, email, and no mention of any notice to the “woman” whose “health records” are available? “, the judge wrote.
“Given this language, Plaintiffs argue that the provision unconstitutionally violates their patients’ right to privacy by authorizing prosecutors to obtain personal medical information without due process. Plaintiffs are right,” he added.
Kemp’s office condemned the judge’s decision.
“The will of Georgians and their representatives has been overturned once again by the personal conviction of a judge. Protecting the lives of the most vulnerable among us is one of our most sacred duties, and Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn,” Kemp spokesman Garrison Douglas said in a statement.
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women, called the decision “an important step in the right direction.”
“We are encouraged by the Georgia court’s decision on bodily autonomy. At the same time, we must not forget that every day the ban is in place is a very long day – and we have felt the terrible consequences of the devastating decision and the preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller,” he said. Simpson.
Thurman and Miller are two women who died after suffering complications after taking abortion pills. Their work was highlighted by Vice President Kamala Harris in her address to the White House.
Miller, who has multiple health problems, was legally afraid to see a doctor, and Thurman spent 20 hours in the hospital until doctors decided they could legally operate on him. This was reported by ProPublica a state board found that both deaths were preventable.