Georgia Supreme Court Restores Abortion Ban After 6 Weeks – Update

UPDATED: The Georgia Supreme Court on Wednesday revived the state’s restrictive abortion law, at least temporarily banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

In its decision, the Supreme Court issued a lower court order prohibiting unlawful storage while the case is appealed, again forcing abortion providers to stop the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled on Nov. 15 that the six-week ban was illegal because it was enacted in 2019 when abortion under Roe v. Wade was still legal throughout the country.

Georgia’s ban went into effect in July after the US Supreme Court ruled that Roe v. Wade picked up.

Abortion rights advocates and doctors filed a lawsuit in July to overturn the law after a federal appeals court allowed the law to go into effect, arguing the law was unconstitutional.

PREVIOUS, July 20: A federal appeals court ruled today that Georgia’s restrictive abortion law of 2019 should go into effect, overturning a lower court.

The three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in a Mississippi case, Roe v. Wade repealed the abortion law and returned it to the states, “making it clear that abortion rights do not exist under the Constitution, so Georgia can prohibit them.

Law in Georgia — a major film and television production center — prohibits most abortions when there is a detectable human heartbeat, which can take up to six weeks for women to know they are pregnant. There are exceptions for rape and incest when it is reported to the police, when the mother’s life is in danger, or when the fetus is medically unviable.

The appeals court also rejected arguments that an unusual “identity provision” contained in the law was unconstitutionally vague. This gives a fetus the same legal rights as everyone else with far-reaching implications and is also beyond the scope of Roe v. Wade and the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned it. Some observers believed it could be separated from the broader law.

Georgia’s ACLU said that “the court took these measures on its own initiative, without a request from the state and outside of normal court procedures.”

The organization, along with the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Southeast and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a joint statement: “This is a highly unorthodox step that will make necessary abortion treatment immediately unavailable to patients after the earliest stages of pregnancy . . . Health care providers across the state are now being forced to turn away patients who believed they would have access to an abortion that immediately changes the course of their lives and their futures. This is terrible. We will continue to do everything we can to fight for abortion access in Georgia despite these damaging attacks on people’s ability to choose if and when they want to have a child.”

The decision will only come into effect after the court has given its official mandate, usually 28 days after an appeal decision. Until then, abortion will remain legal in the state.

With abortion now in the hands of state legislatures, “Georgia voters have the opportunity to vote out politicians who challenge a woman’s right to choose when, if and with whom she wants to start a family,” added Andrea Young , executive director of the ACLU of Georgia, added.

Georgia law was signed by Governor Brian Kemp, who is currently running against Stacey Abrams, whom he narrowly defeated in 2018. She called for a legal solution to restore access to abortion nationwide.

The signing sparked immediate outrage in Hollywood and threats from producers from Disney to Netflix to leave the state if it ever went into effect. It never did. Reproductive rights groups and the ACLU sued, and a district judge issued and ultimately overturned an injunction that was ruled unconstitutional in July 2020.

This was appealed, but last September the Court of Appeals postponed its review of the pending Supreme Court decision in the Mississippi case called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The court ruled on June 24 that “abortion rights are not deeply rooted in the country’s history and tradition.”

With restrictive abortion laws passed, pending or uncertain in nearly half of US states, the entertainment industry faces a bigger challenge than Georgia, although no other state except California has the manufacturing capacity and infrastructure. It was lured there by huge tax credits over the past decade.

“What are you doing all of a sudden? In the office, I colored states with some kind of legislation and tax credits, and they overlap quite a bit,” said an accountant in Georgia.

Major studios did not challenge the Supreme Court ruling, but expanded employee health benefits to cover out-of-state travel for an abortion.