A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the state’s ban was unconstitutional and blocking its enforcement.
Fulton County Senior Judge Robert McBurney wrote in a 26-page opinion that the state’s abortion laws must return to what they were before the six-week ban, known as the Life Act, was passed in 2019. handed down the verdict. The ban was blocked in 2019. Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, but it took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe in 2022.
“Society can intervene only when the fetus growing inside the woman reaches a state of viability and society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life.” McBurney wrote.
Abortion is currently legal in Georgia up to approximately 22 weeks of pregnancy, at which point Georgia allowed abortions before the Life Act was enacted. However, fetal viability tends to emerge closer to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Roe’s precedent policy was supposed to prevent states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, but Georgia and several other states did so anyway even before Roe was ousted.
Under the six-week ban, health care providers could not perform an abortion if they detected fetal heart activity, which appears at about six weeks of pregnancy. McBurney says many women don’t know they’re pregnant until the sixth week.
“For these women, freedom of privacy means they must choose for themselves whether to serve as human incubators for five months until they become viable,” McBurney said. wrote. “More than society can force a legislator or a judge or a commander in The Handmaid’s Tale to tell women what to do with their bodies at a time when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up the kidney for the benefit of others.”
McBurney added in a footnote: “This debate is fraught with the unpleasant and usually unspoken truth of involuntary servitude, which is symbolized by the composition of the defense team in this case.Promoting and defending laws such as the Life Law generally men, and although the effect would require only women, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, it appears that women are primarily poor women, and in Georgia, primarily black women. and brown women. Women are forced to engage in forced labor, which means carrying pregnancies to term at the government’s command.”
The McBurney decision comes in the months after Roe was overturned, and ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candy Miller, died without access to legal abortions. It was handed down a week later. In statements after the McBurney decision, abortion rights supporters highlighted the deaths of Thurman and Miller.
“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said an executive with the Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to Monday’s ruling. Director Monica Simpson said: “At the same time, we must remember that each day Prohibition has been in place has been too long, and with the devastating and avoidable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candy Miller. I have felt the consequences.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, may appeal the case to the state Supreme Court and seek to reinstate the six-week ban. The Supreme Court previously allowed the ban to take effect early in the case.
