Arizona can enforce a near-total ban on abortions that has been blocked for nearly 50 years, a judge ruled Friday, meaning that clinics statewide will have to stop providing the procedures to avoid criminal charges against doctors and other medical workers.
The judge lifted a decades-old injunction that blocked enforcement of the law on the books since before Arizona became a state. The only exemption to the ban is if the woman’s life is in jeopardy.
Abortion providers have been on a rollercoaster since June, when the US supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision guaranteeing women a constitutional right to an abortion, allowing states to regulate abortion as they wish.
Planned Parenthood had urged the judge not to allow enforcement, and its president declared that the ruling “takes Arizonans back to living under an archaic, 150-year-old law”.
Mark Brnovich, the Republican attorney general, who had urged the judge to lift the injunction so the ban could be enforced, cheered.
“We applaud the court for upholding the will of the legislature and providing clarity and uniformity on this important issue,” Brnovich said.
The ruling comes amid an election season in which Democrats have seized on abortion rights as a potent issue. Senator Mark Kelly, under a challenge from Republican Blake Masters, said it “will have a devastating impact on the freedom Arizona women have had for decades” to choose an abortion. Democrat Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, called it the product of a decades-long attack on reproductive freedom by Republicans that can only be fended off by voters in November.
Masters and Kari Lake, the Republican running against Hobbs, both back abortion restrictions.
The near-total abortion ban was enacted decades before Arizona secured statehood in 1912. Prosecutions were halted after the injunction was handed down after the Roe decision. Even so, the Legislature reenacted the law several times, most recently in 1977.
Under the law, anyone convicted of performing a surgical abortion or providing drugs for a medication abortion could face two to five years in prison.
A physician who runs a clinic providing abortions said she was dismayed but not surprised by the decision. “It kind of goes with what I’ve been saying for a while now: it is the intent of the people who run this state that abortion be illegal here,” said Dr DeShawn Taylor.
The judge has said Planned Parenthood was free to file a new challenge. But with Arizona’s tough abortion laws and the state’s supreme court and legislature controlled by Republicans, the chances of success appear slim.
Bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy were in place in 12 Republican-led states; in Wisconsin, clinics have stopped providing abortions amid litigation over whether an 1849 ban is in effect. Georgia bans abortions once fetal cardiac activity can be detected. Florida and Utah have bans that kick in after 15 and 18 weeks gestation, respectively.
The ruling also came a day before a new Arizona law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy takes effect.
