Georgia Supreme Court reinstates 6-week abortion ban as it considers appeal

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed the law in 2019, when GOP lawmakers across the country were pushing for similar “heartbeat” bills ahead of the abortion issue once again landing before the Supreme Court. In the two years since it was allowed to take effect after the fall of Roe v. Wade, Georgia’s abortion ban has been tied up in legal proceedings.

Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the lead plaintiff in the case, described the Monday decision as “unconscionable.”

She told The Washington Post on Monday that Georgia’s lawmakers were “more committed to political gains than the lives of the folks who live in this state,” referencing a recent ProPublica investigation that found at least two women had died in the state after they could not access legal abortions or timely medical care.

“We knew that the ban should not exist whenever they put it into place, but to now have documented proof that people have literally lost their lives — it’s just a very sad day for us in Georgia,” Simpson said.

Attorney General Chris Carr (R) commended the ruling in a statement Monday and said his office would “continue to defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Georgia.”

Abortion has remained a core issue ahead of November’s elections as voters weigh candidates and abortion-related ballot measures. Attention to the issue in Georgia, one of the seven critical battleground states in the presidential race, has been particularly intense since ProPublica published its investigation into the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.

Conservative politicians in Georgia — a deep-red state with a Republican governor and GOP-led legislature — have sought to restrict abortion access for years.

As Kemp signed the abortion bill in May 2019, he said he was keeping his promise to enact the “toughest abortion bill in the country.”

But since the fall of Roe in 2022, Georgia’s ban has been tied up in court after abortion rights groups alleged that it violated the state’s constitution and the liberty and privacy rights of residents.

On Sept. 30, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney struck down the ban, dramatically expanding abortion access — both in the state and in the South, where it is largely restricted.

In his decision, McBurney wrote that the central dispute of the case was “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,” he wrote.

After McBurney’s decision, a spokesperson for Kemp said in a statement that “the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge.” The attorney general’s office filed an emergency petition to stay the order while it appealed.

In a partial dissent Monday, Justice John J. Ellington argued against granting the emergency request. Ellington wrote that the state had failed “to show any reason for urgency that goes beyond their underlying arguments in favor of allowing the State to prevent women from deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected and before a fetus is viable.”

For the week that McBurney’s ruling stood, some abortion providers in Georgia had gotten more calls and saw patients who had traveled from out of state, Simpson said.

“For the past seven days, that’s what was possible for folks in Georgia,” she said. “And now we are taking people right back to where we were.”