Georgia’s Supreme Court just put a six-week abortion ban back into effect

The Georgia Supreme Court has reinstated the state’s six-week abortion ban one week after a lower court struck it down.

Georgia’s “heartbeat” bill, passed by the Republican-led state legislature in 2019 and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R), bans abortions after doctors can detect an embryo’s heartbeat. A fetal heartbeat is usually detectable around six weeks of pregnancy (before most women even realize they’re pregnant). The law also allows abortions in some cases of fetal anomalies or when medical issues threaten the gestational parent’s life.

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The 2019 law went into effect in June 2022 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision legalizing abortion access nationwide.

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Last week, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled that the 2019 law was “unconstitutional.” His ruling made the state revert to its previous policy of allowing abortions through 22 weeks of pregnancy.

“Liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights 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 wrote in his ruling. “That power is not, however, unlimited. 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.”

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr immediately appealed McBurney’s ruling to the state Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court overruled McBurney’s decision, but left in place a lower court ruling that blocked a provision of the law that allowed state prosecutors to access abortion patients’ medical records without due process protections, NBC News reported.

Despite the reinstatement of the state’s six-week abortion ban, the battle over the ban’s constitutionality will continue to play out in an appeals court. But for now, reproductive rights groups have criticized the state’s Supreme Court ruling.

“It is cruel that our patients’ ability to access the reproductive health care they need has been taken away yet again,” wrote Feminist Women’s Health Center Executive Director Kwajelyn Jackson, in a statement. “This ban has wreaked havoc on Georgians’ lives, and our patients deserve better.”

Planned Parenthood Southeast spokesperson Jaylen Black called the ruling “an egregious example of how far anti-abortion lawmakers and judges will go to strip Georgians of their fundamental rights,” adding, “[The ban] resulted in the devastating, preventable deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller and will continue to harm Georgians as long as it is in effect.”

Thurman and Miller are two Black women who died in 2022 after experiencing complications from taking abortion pills. Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats generally have pointed to similar deaths as proof of how abortion bans threaten the lives of women nationwide.

Recent polling has shown that majorities of voters in almost every demographic support legalized abortion — the only group that doesn’t is evangelical Protestants. This issue may spell trouble for Republicans as 10 states will vote on abortion-related ballot measures in November, and the issue has typically increased Democratic turnout to the polls.

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