Georgia high court restores state's 6-week 'heartbeat' abortion law
The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday stopped a lower court’s ruling from last week that allowed abortions up to 22 weeks, as opposed to six weeks, as it considers an appeal filed by the state.
The order from the state Supreme Court came a week after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that abortions must be regulated the way they were before the "Heartbeat Law" went into effect, meaning abortions could be allowed until the 22-week mark.
The Associated Press reported that Justice John J. Ellington argued against McBurney’s ruling, saying the case "should not be predetermined in the State’s favor before the appeal is even docketed."
"The State should not be in the business of enforcing laws that have been determined to violate fundamental rights guaranteed to millions of individuals under the Georgia Constitution," Ellington wrote. "The ‘status quo’ that should be maintained is the state of the law before the challenged laws took effect."
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Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed the "Heartbeat" abortion bill, also known as the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, into law in 2019. The law made abortions after the six-week mark illegal.
McBurney called the law "unconstitutional."
"The authors of our Constitutions, state and federal, entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning," McBurney wrote in his final order last week. "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.
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"That power is not, however, unlimited," the judge added. "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 continued by saying a law that prevents abortions after six weeks was inconsistent with those rights as well as the proper balance that a viability rule establishes between a woman’s rights and society’s interests in protecting and caring for unborn infants.
There were exceptions written into the law Kemp signed in 2019, including rape and incest as long as a police report was filed.
The law signed by Kemp was blocked by a federal judge in October 2019 – before it went into effect – and ruled it violated the right to abortion as established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
The Supreme Court then overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, clearing the way for Georgia’s law on abortion to go into effect.
McBurney, in November 2022, ruled the law was "unequivocally unconstitutional" because it was enacted in 2019 when Roe v. Wade allowed abortions after six weeks.
But in October 2023, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected the ruling in a 6-1 decision, saying McBurney was wrong.
McBurney’s ruling last week determined that the state, county, municipal and other local authorities are "enjoined" from seeking to enforce the six-week abortion law.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.