Abortion ban struck down by Georgia state supreme court
A judge in Fulton County, Georgia, has struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban. As a result it would allow for abortion to be legal up to the 22nd week of pregnancy.
The state law, the LIFE Act, was signed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2019 and took effect in July 2022 following a legal challenge and the overturning of Roe v Wade by the federal Supreme Court.
Georgia Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his ruling that a review of “our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”
The power, he added, is not “unlimited.”
“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.”
The law’s fundamental alteration to the previous state law was “its extreme narrowing of the window of time within which women have the legal ability to end a pregnancy from roughly twenty weeks (i.e., viability) down to a mere six weeks, a point at which many — if not most — women are completely unaware or at best unsure if they are pregnant.”
The state will appeal the decision, a spokesperson for the Attorney General Christopher Carr has said.
The case came as a result of a lawsuit by Sister Song Women of Colour Reproductive Justice Collective along with other plaintiffs in 2019, soon after Kemp signed the LIFE Act into law. It faced a legal challenge and in 2022, McBurney ruled that it had violated the American constitution, striking it down.
