Georgia Supreme Court Restores State’s 6-Week Abortion Ban

The ban will resume while the court considers an appeal to a decision that had briefly allowed greater access to abortions in the state.

The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a state law that prohibits abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy while it considers an appeal to a lower court decision that had briefly restored greater access to the procedure.

The abortion law, called the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, or the LIFE Act, was set to take effect again at 5 p.m. Monday.

Six justices agreed in full with the majority ruling, and another only in part. One justice did not participate and another had been disqualified from participating in the case.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, states were left to regulate the rules around the procedure. Since then, about 20 states have banned or restricted abortions, effectively ending the practice in the South. Many lawsuits have been filed to challenge those new standards.

On Sept. 30, Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court overturned the Georgia law because he found that it violated the state’s Constitution.

“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 health care choices,” Judge McBurney wrote in his 26-page ruling.

The judge’s decision allowed the procedure to continue in Georgia up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, giving women in the state and across the South a short window to obtain an abortion past six weeks, when many women do not even realize that they are pregnant.

After Judge McBurney’s ruling, many clinics in Georgia began offering medical and surgical abortions up to about 11 or 12 weeks of pregnancy. One clinic, the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, has performed the procedure until 22 weeks.

“We know that several providers in Georgia were able to resume abortion care really quickly,” said Brittany Fonteno, the president and chief executive of the National Abortion Federation. “It speaks to the resilience of the providers in Georgia. They were really overwhelmed by the amount of people who immediately came to them for care.”

Republican state officials were angered by the lower court’s decision, and moved to immediately appeal it.

“We believe Georgia’s LIFE Act is fully constitutional,” said Kara Murray, a spokeswoman for Chris Carr, a Republican who is Georgia’s attorney general, last week.

Monday’s ruling was the second time the six-week abortion ban had been reinstated by the State Supreme Court. In the first challenge to the law, the court rejected arguments made by doctors and advocacy groups that the act was void and unconstitutional when the state approved it before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The court, however, sent the case back to a lower court on the question of whether the state’s Constitution protects a right to privacy, and whether that right encompasses abortion, which Judge McBurney decided on.

“We had a small window and a small victory,” said Monica Simpson, the executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the plaintiff in the case. “We’re seeing history repeat itself.”

Abortion access has remained a top presidential campaign issue in Georgia, where President Biden won a narrow victory in 2020.

Vice President Kamala Harris has centered much of her presidential campaign around a woman’s right to have the procedure, and has drawn attention to the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, two Georgia women who died after they couldn’t get access to abortions and urgent medical care.