The Georgia Supreme Court has reversed a lower court’s ruling that said the state’s six-week abortion ban should be tossed out because it was passed when Roe v. Wade was still standing.
The ruling, which can be found here, was released Tuesday morning, nearly seven months after the court heard oral arguments.
A group of health care providers and abortion rights advocates filed the lawsuit in state court last year arguing that Georgia lawmakers should have to attempt to pass the restrictions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. I. McBurney agreed, ruling the restrictions “plainly unconstitutional” when they were created.
But Justice Verda M. Colvin, who penned the opinion for the majority, wrote that McBurney’s ruling relied on a “faulty premise.”
The U.S. Constitution, Colvin noted, is the same text it was when Gov. Brian Kemp signed the six-week ban into law in 2019. And the courts must now look to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for guidance, even if the law in question pre-dates the ruling that upended a nearly 50-year-old precedent.
“The United States Supreme Court does not supply meaning to, and has no power to change, the independent and fixed meaning of the United States Constitution,” Colvin wrote. “And we have no authority to defy now-controlling United States Supreme Court precedent interpreting the United States Constitution when determining whether the LIFE Act violated the Constitution at the time of its enactment. The dissenting opinion is wrong to suggest otherwise.”
Only one justice, John J. Ellington, dissented.
“Under well-settled Georgia law, a legislative act that is unconstitutional on the date it is enacted is void from its inception and forever afterward,” Ellington wrote.
“I freely concede that, after the United States Supreme Court overrules its own precedent interpreting the United States Constitution, Georgia courts must follow the United States Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on that Constitution’s meaning,” Ellington also wrote. “But the General Assembly, under the Georgia Constitution, must also follow that Court’s most recent pronouncement on the United States Constitution’s meaning.”
Two justices were not part of the opinion. Presiding Justice Nels S.D. Peterson was disqualified from the case, and Justice Andrew A. Pinson did not participate.
The state law bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, which is usually at about six weeks and before many women know they are pregnant. McBurney’s now-reversed ruling also threw out a requirement that physicians report to the state Department of Public Health when an abortion qualified under the state’s narrow exceptions, such as in the case of rape if a police report has been filed.
Tuesday’s ruling only addresses one narrow piece of the lawsuit, leaving the rest to be sorted in the lower court.
This is a developing story.
This story was published earlier by the Georgia Recorder, an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom network, which includes the Florida Phoenix.
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