UPDATE (Oct. 7, 2024, 1:58 p.m. ET): The Georgia Supreme Court on Monday temporarily reinstated the state’s six-week abortion ban that a lower court struck down last week. The ban will remain in effect while the state’s appeal proceeds in the state’s high court.
It’s not every day when a judge references “The Handmaid’s Tale” in a high-profile court ruling, but that’s precisely what happened when a judge struck down Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. NBC News reported:
A judge in Fulton County, Georgia, struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban Monday, allowing the procedure to resume and making it legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The state law, known as the LIFE Act, was signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019 but didn’t take effect until July 2022, after it faced a legal challenge and the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.”
As my colleague Lisa Rubin explained in a social media thread that’s worth your time, it was quite a ruling from Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who concluded that the meaning of “liberty” in Georgia includes “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 healthcare choices.”
McBurney added that the Republican-imposed ban was “extreme” in its “narrowing of the window of time within which women have the legal ability to end a pregnancy from roughly twenty weeks (i.e., viability) down to a mere six weeks, a point at which many — if not most — women are completely unaware or at best unsure if they are pregnant.”
He went on to write that “for many women, their pregnancy was unintended, unexpected, and often unknown until well after the embryonic heartbeat began. Yet that’s too late under the LIFE Act’s strictures: these women are now forbidden from undoing that life-altering change of circumstances — before they even knew the change had occurred.”
“For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another,” McBurney concluded.
With this in mind, women in Georgia can, for now, terminate unwanted and/or dangerous pregnancies up to 22 weeks.
But in the meantime, it’s also worth emphasizing that McBurney’s ruling, while heartening and progressive, comes too late for some — because there’s ample evidence to suggest that Georgia’s poorly named LIFE Act was responsible for the deaths of at least two local women. As my MSNBC colleague Sarah Posner recently explained, Amber Nicole Thurman died in 2022 after she failed to receive the medical care she needed — because her physicians “were terrified of committing a felony under the state’s abortion ban.” Soon after the public learned of the Thurman tragedy, we were confronted by a related story: Candi Miller also died in Georgia, and as ProPublica reported, maternal health experts have blamed Georgia Republicans’ abortion ban. GOP officials in the state have already vowed to appeal the latest ruling. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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