Georgia judge lifts state’s abortion ban, allowing care to resume

A judge in Georgia on Monday lifted the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and prevents its enforcement.

In a 26-page opinion, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws should return to what they were before the six-week ban — known as the Life Act — was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked for 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 becomes viable, when society can assume the care and responsibility of that individual life, then – and only then – can society intervene,” McBurney wrote.

Abortions are now legal in Georgia until about 22 weeks of pregnancy – the point at which Georgia allowed abortions before the Life Act. However, fetal viability usually occurs closer to the 24th week of pregnancy. Although the Roe case law was intended to prevent states from banning abortion before the fetus was viable, Georgia and several other states were already doing so before Roe fell.

Under the six-week ban, providers were not allowed to perform abortions if they detected fetal heart activity, which manifests after about six weeks of pregnancy. Many women, McBurney wrote, don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks.

“For these women, freedom of privacy means they alone must choose whether to serve as a human breeding ground for the five months prior to their viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for any legislator, judge, or 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 than society could (or should to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and mostly unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude floating through this debate, symbolically exemplified by the makeup of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws such as the Life Act, the effect of which is to oblige only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, mainly poor women, meaning that in Georgia, mainly black and brown women – to perform compulsory labor, that is, to carry out a pregnancy on behalf of the government.”

McBurney’s ruling comes weeks later ProPublica reports this that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being denied access to legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements following McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights advocates highlighted the deaths of Thurman and Miller.

“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled on 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 must not forget that every day the ban has been in effect has been a day too long – and we have felt the terrible consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”

Georgia’s attorney general, Republican Chris Carr, could appeal the case to the state Supreme Court and ask it to reinstate the six-week ban. The Supreme Court already allowed the ban to take effect earlier in the case.