Georgia's Top Court Upholds 6-Week Abortion Ban

The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a lower court ruling that the state's restrictive abortion law was invalid, leaving limited access to abortions unchanged for now. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said last November that the ban was "unequivocally unconstitutional" because it was enacted in 2019, when Roe v. Wade allowed abortions well past six weeks. Georgia's law bans most abortions after roughly six weeks, before many women even know they are pregnant. The Georgia Supreme Court, in a 6-1 decision, said McBurney was wrong, the AP reports.

"When the United States Supreme Court overrules its own precedent interpreting the United States Constitution, we are then obligated to apply the Court's new interpretation of the Constitution's meaning on matters of federal constitutional law," Justice Verda Colvin wrote for the majority. The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia said in a news release the opinion disregards "long-standing precedent that a law violating either the state or federal Constitution at the time of its enactment is void from the start under the Georgia Constitution." The group represented doctors and advocacy groups that had asked McBurney to throw out the law.

The ruling does not change abortion access in Georgia and is not the last word on the state's ban.The state Supreme Court had previously allowed enforcement of the ban to resume while it considered an appeal of the lower court decision. The lower court judge has also not ruled on the merits of other arguments in a lawsuit challenging the ban, including that it violates Georgia residents' rights to privacy. In its ruling on Tuesday, the state Supreme Court sent the case back to McBurney to consider those arguments.

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who signed Georgia's ban, hailed the ruling, while Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said it would continue the suffering women have faced. SisterSong is one of the plaintiffs challenging Georgia's law. "This abortion ban has forced Georgians to travel across state lines at great expense or continue the life-altering consequences of pregnancy and childbirth against their wills," she said in a statement.

(More Georgia stories.)