A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced.
In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.
“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 wrote.
Effectively, around and about, the State court judge is insisting upon the Roe argument – privacy. This could also be true under the Georgia state cnostitution. We know from Dobbs that it’s not under the US federal one. But it could be true more locally.
Have to wait and see really.
McBurney’s ruling arrives weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements after McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights supporters highlighted Thurman and Miller’s deaths.
“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the case that led to Monday’s ruling. “At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”
What excellent Newspeak that is. Both women died after actually having medical abortions – you know, those pills that are so safe people are prescribing them over the internet? At least one of them then got truly loousy, no good, treatment for the partial failure of the pills but it’s wasn’t the absence of an abortion that killed her.
“SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective”
FFS.
None of this has anything to do with laws. The US is a shitty banana republic, ruled by sociopaths:
It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”
You have to be a specially trained liar to make the allegation that being pregnant is “compulsory labour”.
. . . that being pregnant is “compulsory labour”.
Being obliged to give birth might be fairly if pendantically called such, but otherwise it’s a weak argument. The law requires parents to not kill, harm, abandon or neglect their born children but that doesn’t make child rearing forced labour.
It seems unlikely the view of a leftie county judge will prevail in Georgia for long. Having said that, I think all the states will end up with a European style compromise in a couple of decades . They’d have had that by now but for Roe vs Wade.
PJF – pretty bold assumption that either the USA or what we currently think of as Europe will still exist in two decades time.
I wouldn’t put money on it, they’re merrily aborting and contracepting away any future they might have had.
Argumentum ab Armagedon
PJF – the latest news out of the formerly German country of Germany:
Machete-armed man with Palestinian flag wounds 31 in Germany with arson, ramming attacks
A 41-year-old Syrian national wounded 31 people, including two children who were left in critical condition, in arson attacks on Saturday in the German city of Essen, according to police and media reports from Sunday morning
She won’t be alright, mate.
@PJF – “The law requires parents to not … abandon … their born children”
Only for a narrow interpretation of abandon. Parents can put their children up for adoption.