Georgia AG challenges court ruling over abortion ban
Superior court had decided on Monday that the state's abortion ban was unconstitutional
The Georgia Attorney General has challenged a superior court judge’s ruling that the state’s six-week abortion ban was unconstitutional.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued the order on Monday to stop Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, or LIFE Act, which bans abortions past six weeks. The decision came after the state had been in the news recently after ProPublica reported that two women had died as a result of not being able to obtain medically necessary abortions following the law’s enactment.
McBurney said the law was unconstitutional because it violated the state’s liberty and privacy guarantees.
State AG Christopher Carr filed the motion with the state supreme court on Wednesday. Carr pointed out that abortion hadn’t been mentioned explicitly by the Georgia Constitution. He called McBurney’s reasoning “barely colorable.”
It concluded its summary by saying.
The superior court’s new order is just as erroneous as its first. Though rife with political arguments, irrelevant (and erroneous) legal tangents, and ad hominem attacks, the superior court’s opinion never comes close to identifying a genuine constitutional flaw in the LIFE Act. And the equities remain in the State’s favor. The Court should stay the superior court’s order, and if the Court needs time to review the emergency filings, it should issue an administrative stay while it considers this petition.
The Georgia law had come under fire recently after ProPublica published an investigative series about two women who had mainly died because they couldn’t get the necessary medical abortions as a result of doctors being reluctant to perform the procedure under the state’s ban.
That state supreme court had previously remanded one of McBurney’s decisions back to his court after he had issued the same injunction in 2022. The decision on Monday was the result of two years of deliberations.