A federal judge has ruled that a new North Dakota law that would ban abortions after 6 weeks is “unconstitutional” and “invalid.”
U.S District Judge Daniel Hovland in Bismarck, the capital, has blocked the law from taking effect.
“There is no question that (the North Dakota law) is in direct contradiction to a litany of United States Supreme Court cases addressing restraints on abortion,” Hovland wrote. ” (It) is clearly an invalid and unconstitutional law based on the United States Supreme Court precedent in Roe v. Wade from 1973 … and the progeny of cases that have followed.”
If the law passed, it would make Republican-controlled North Dakota the most difficult state in which to get an abortion.
The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed the lawsuit after the law was passed earlier this year by the North Dakota Legislature. As written, the law would outlaw the procedure six weeks into pregnancy. Often, women don’t even know they are pregnant that early on.
Bebe Anderson, director of the U.S. Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights, expressed her support of Hovland’s ruling in a statement today.
“The nation’s most extreme abortion ban has been blocked, and the message to hostile politicians could not be clearer: the rights of women guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution and protected by 40 years of Supreme Court precedent cannot be legislated away.”
Let’s hope other conservative states take note and rethink restrictive abortion laws.
SOURCE: ABC
