Just one week after a county court in Georgia blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, the state Supreme Court reinstated it, and the ban will take effect once again at 5 p.m. on Monday. The Georgia Supreme Court will still hear arguments from the state before making a final decision on an unspecified date but, for now, chose to listen to Attorney General Chris Carr’s (R) argument that the court restore the ban because patients “will not suffer much harm.” This argument is inexplicable just weeks after the state’s maternal mortality committee confirmed the first two maternal deaths that were caused by the state’s abortion ban.
“This ban has already killed multiple women, yet Attorney General Carr rushed to court to reinstate it, ensuring more lives will be lost. This ruling will surely be a death sentence for some, and we won’t back down from this fight,” Alice Wang, staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. CRR, together with the ACLU, ACLU of Georgia, and Planned Parenthood, filed the lawsuit challenging the ban on behalf of organizations and reproductive health clinics including SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Feminist Women’s Health Clinic, Atlanta Comprehensive Wellness Clinic, and Planned Parenthood Southeast.
Last week, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney issued a blistering ruling against the ban, and allowed health providers to offer abortion services until 22 weeks. “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote,” he wrote. McBurney stressed that when a pregnancy becomes viable, “then—and only then—may society intervene.” (To be clear, no pregnancy is the same, and “fetal viability” isn’t an arbitrary term or pregnancy marker.)
CRR and other reproductive rights advocates collectively celebrated McBurney’s ruling but correctly predicted that Georgia would appeal it and the ban might be reinstated. “We are prepared to continue fighting this case regardless, and we will NOT back down from this fight,” CRR wrote last week. On Monday, the organization maintained that “despite this devastating setback, we are prepared to fight like hell when the case goes before the Georgia Supreme Court. This is NOT over, and we are NOT backing down.”
In September, ProPublica reported on the first two abortion ban-induced maternal deaths, both in Georgia, as state maternal mortality committees across the country finally begin to assess post-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health data. Both women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, were Black women and mothers to young children when they died in 2022, just weeks after Georgia’s ban took effect. Thurman and Miller both took abortion pills and experienced complications that would have been treatable with a dilation and curettage abortion procedure—but Georgia’s ban made this procedure a felony punishable with prison time.
Citing Thurman and Miller’s stories, Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, called the Georgia Supreme Court’s ruling “unconscionable” and condemned the court for ignoring “all evidence that this ban is killing us.”
“For years, Black women have sounded the alarm about the dangers of abortion bans. With these devastating losses, extremists can no longer deny this fatal reality,” Simpson said in a statement. “This ban is rooted in white supremacy and intensifies an already dire situation in Georgia, where Black women are more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy complications compared to white women.”
CRR pointed to one silver lining in the state Supreme Court’s Monday action. The court left in place the part of McBurney’s ruling that blocks a provision of the abortion ban which granted prosecutors broader access to abortion patients’ medical data. Miller’s family told ProPublica that Miller refused to seek medical help as she experienced complications from her medication abortion because she feared being prosecuted.
The Georgia Supreme Court’s decision reflects the pure chaos of the post-Dobbs abortion rights landscape. About half of all states impose total or near-total abortion bans, but amid ongoing, nonstop litigation, enforcement of these laws is constantly in flux, and it’s nearly impossible for doctors—let alone patients navigating dangerous or unwanted pregnancies—to navigate this.
