Georgia judge says state can’t enforce 6-week abortion ban

In the ruling Monday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote: “Whether one couches it as liberty or privacy (or even equal protection), this dispute is fundamentally about the extent of a woman’s right to control what happens to and within her body.”

“The baseline rule is clear: a legally competent person has absolute authority over her body and should brook no governmental interference in what she does — and does not do — in terms of health, hygiene, and the like,” McBurney wrote.

The state plans to “immediately appeal” the decision, said Kara Murray, a spokesperson for Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R), adding that his office believed the 2019 law is “fully constitutional.” If the ruling stands, it has the potential to increase access to abortion in the South, where the procedure is severely restricted.

In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for Kemp condemned the decision, saying “the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge.”

Abortion has emerged as a key issue for voters in November’s election as they weigh local and national candidates and ballot measures about the procedure. Vice President Kamala Harris has made abortion access a central tenet of her presidential campaign against former president Donald Trump, including in Georgia, one of seven core battleground states.

In 2019, when Kemp signed Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, other GOP-led states were pursuing similar “heartbeat” bills. The push came in anticipation of abortion coming before the Supreme Court, which had moved to a solid 5-4 conservative majority with the addition of two Trump appointees.

As he signed Georgia’s bill, which would take effect should Roe be overturned, Kemp said he was making good on his promise to enact the “toughest abortion bill in the country.”

Since it was allowed to be implemented in 2022, Georgia’s abortion ban, like others spearheaded by conservative legislators, has faced legal challenges.

In November 2022, McBurney overturned the ban, ruling that it violated people’s liberty and privacy rights under the state constitution. But a week later, the Georgia Supreme Court paused the judge’s ruling, reinstating the ban while it considered an appeal.

The state’s Supreme Court then ruled in October that the six-week abortion ban would remain in place while it remanded the lawsuit back to McBurney’s court. That led to the latest ruling, in which McBurney struck down the law once more.

In his ruling Monday, McBurney wrote that the state constitution supports adults making decisions about their bodies, from tattoos and piercings to elective and essential medical procedures. He added that women’s “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,” he wrote.

Monday’s decision, though not a final say on the law, adds fuel to the national firestorm surrounding abortion. Since moving to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Harris has made reproductive rights a key focus of her campaign, attacking state restrictions as “Trump’s abortion bans” during speeches in recent weeks.

Earlier this month, Harris added an impromptu stop in Georgia after a ProPublica investigation found that at least two women died in the state after they did not receive proper medical care because of the abortion restrictions there.

In her Sept. 20 speech in Atlanta, Harris blamed Trump for the deaths of those women. One of the women at the center of ProPublica’s reporting, Amber Thurman, died after waiting 20 hours for treatment at a hospital near Atlanta.

On Monday, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the lead plaintiff in the Georgia abortion case, referenced the deaths of Thurman and the second woman, Candi Miller, in a statement on the ruling.

“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” Monica Simpson, SisterSong’s executive director, said in the statement. “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.”

In Atlanta, Harris told the crowd that Trump was “the architect of this crisis.”

“He brags about overturning Roe v. Wade — in his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it.’ He says he is proud,” Harris said. “Proud that women are dying, proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care and proud that young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”

The day before the speech, Thurman’s mother and two sisters spoke at a live stream event that Harris held with talk-show host Oprah Winfrey.

“You’re looking at a mother that is broken,” said Shanette Williams, Thurman’s mother. “The worst pain ever that a mother, that a parent, could ever feel, for her father and myself and the family — you’re looking at it.”