A judge in Fulton County, Georgia, ruled that the six-week abortion ban enacted in the State since 2022 is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. This means that for the time being, Georgia’s abortion law reverts to what it was before 2019: that is, abortion is legal again up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Georgia’s attorney general, Republican Chris Carr, could appeal the case to the State Supreme Court and request that it reinstate the six-week ban.
Nevertheless, it is a sensational development in the Southern state that was the first in the Union to enact a strict ban (abortion only up to the sixth week is practically a total ban, since within that time frame a woman may not even realize she’s pregnant). The Georgia 2019 law, known as the Life Act, was voted in before the US Supreme Court overturned the historical Roe vs Wade ruling in 2022, that for fifty years had protected the federal right to abortion. The Georgia Life Act went fully into effect after Roe vs. Wade was overturned.
Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney used strong language in his 26-page opinion, declaring that abortion should be legal until the fetus can survive autonomously and society can take care of it. “When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.
The Life Act stated that providers could not perform abortions if they detected fetal cardiac activity, which happens around the sixth week of pregnancy. “For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”
McBurney was even more forceful in a footnote: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”
Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, the first two women known to have died because they could not have an abortion, were from Georgia, as a report from ProPublica documented last week. Associations fighting for the right to choice fear that many other cases will emerge, as the consequences of the ban enacted in many States of the Union come to light.
Abortion remains at the center of the electoral campaign for the White House. The right to choice is one of the weapons yielded by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, seeking the votes of American women, who are overwhelmingly in favor of reproductive rights; according to polls, also a majority of American men think abortion should be legal and federally protected.
Meanwhile, Louisiana, another Southern state, which also bans abortion, classified two common abortion pills as “controlled substances”. The State passed a law reclassifying mifepristone and misoprostol as schedule IV drugs – meaning they are considered drugs potentially creating abuse or dependence. Pregnant women who get the pills for their own use are exempt from punishment, but whoever else is found with a pill without medical prescription could incur up to 5 years of prison.
Since in States where abortion is banned abortion pills are often procured by mail to use in the privacy of one’s own home (a procedure which carries some risks), the law is apparently aimed at discouraging people to help women in need. But doctors in Louisiana are protesting and declaring the law is dangerous because it discourages the use of two drugs widely employed also to soften the cervix during labour, treat strong>postpartum hemorrhage and miscarriage consequences, and even treating ulcers.
