Demonstrators hold signs while marching during a protest against Georgia’s “heartbeat” abortion bill in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., on Saturday, May 25, 2019. People gathered to protest the state’s recently passed House Bill 481, which would ban abortion after a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat usually around the sixth week of pregnancy. Photographer: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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A judge in Georgia’s Fulton County struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban Monday, allowing the procedure to resume and making it legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.
The state law was signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019 but didn’t take effect until July 2022 after it faced a legal challenge and the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his ruling Monday that a review of “of our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that 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.”
“That power is not, however, unlimited,” McBurney continued. “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.”
The judge wrote that the law’s fundamental alteration to previous state law was “its extreme narrowing of the window of time within which women have the legal ability to end a pregnancy from roughly twenty weeks (i.e., viability) down to a mere six weeks, a point at which many — if not most — women are completely unaware or at best unsure if they are pregnant.”
The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and other plaintiffs in 2019 soon after Kemp signed it into law. As it faced the legal challenge, in 2022, McBurney ruled that year that the law violated the U.S. Constitution in 2022 and struck it down. The Georgia Supreme Court, however, soon took up the case and allowed it to remain in effect.