Georgia Supreme Court Temporarily Reinstates Near-Total Abortion Ban

A week after a judge struck down Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, the state’s Supreme Court announced Monday that it’s reinstating the ban while it weighs Georgia officials’ appeal of the lower court’s ruling.

Following the high court’s 6-1 vote, the near-total ban on abortions will go back into effect at 5 p.m. local time on Monday, upending a major win for reproductive rights advocates.

“It is cruel that our patients’ ability to access the reproductive health care they need has been taken away yet again,” Kwajelyn Jackson, executive director at Atlanta’s Feminist Women’s Health Center, said following the ruling. “Once again, we are being forced to turn away those in need of abortion care beyond six weeks of pregnancy and deny them care that we are fully capable of providing to change their lives.”

Justice John Ellington, the ruling’s sole dissenter, wrote in his dissent that 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.”

Georgia’s six-week ban went into effect in July 2022, a month after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

When Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney struck down that ban last week, he determined that the law treated women like “some piece of collectively owned community property” and that until a fetus reaches viability at around 22-24 weeks, such a ban was a violation of Georgians’ constitutional rights.

Reinstating the ban is especially egregious given recent findings about its impact, critics said.

“This ban has already killed multiple women, yet Attorney General Carr rushed to court to reinstate it, ensuring more lives will be lost,” Alice Wang, a staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “This ruling will surely be a death sentence for some, and we won’t back down from this fight.”

Last month, a ProPublica investigation found that 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman suffered a preventable death after being denied care under Georgia’s abortion ban. Days later, the outlet reported on 41-year-old Candi Miller, another woman whose death was linked to the state’s ban.

For now, the Georgia Supreme Court has left in place a ruling blocking state prosecutors’ access to abortion patients’ medical records.

Monday’s ruling comes the same day the U.S. Supreme Court declined to rule on a case brought by the Biden administration seeking to force Texas to follow federal guidance requiring hospitals to perform emergency abortions.