WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court won’t revive Alabama’s attempt to ban the most commonly used procedure in second-trimester abortions after the measure was blocked by lower courts.
The justices rejected the state’s appeal Friday and declined to review a lower court ruling that blocked the law. The 2016 Alabama law sought to ban the abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation, a procedure Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall referred to in court filings as “dismemberment abortion.”
Lower courts have blocked similar laws in Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, but this was the first case to go before the Supreme Court, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the Alabama law.
Randall Marshall, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, said the ban would have effectively ended access to second trimester abortions in Alabama if it had been allowed to take effect.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who supports overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that first declared abortion rights, did not dissent from the decision to pass on the Alabama case, but described the abortion procedure at issue as “particularly gruesome.”
“The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents States from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible,” Thomas said.
Two Alabama abortion clinics and the ACLU had challenged the 2016 law in court.
Also Friday, a federal judge blocked an Indiana law that would ban the same second-trimester abortion procedure, just days before the law was set to come into force.
It was set to become effective on July 1.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana sued on behalf of two doctors who perform dilation and evacuation abortions. Under the law, a doctor who performs the procedure could face a felony charge, punishable by up to six years in prison.
ACLU attorneys argued that the ban would put a “substantial and unwarranted burden on women’s ability to obtain second-trimester, pre-viability abortions.”
In granting the preliminary injunction that blocked the law, U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker wrote that it “prohibits physicians from utilizing the most common, safest, often most cost effective, and best understood method of second trimester abortion, requiring them instead to resort to alternatives that are medically riskier, more costly, less reliable, and in some instances simply unavailable, while accomplishing little more than expressing hostility towards the constitutionally fundamental right of women to control their own reproductive lives.”
Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill said in a statement he expected to appeal the ruling.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, opponents of Georgia’s new “heartbeat” law filed a long-expected lawsuit Friday, setting the case on a path that the anti-abortion measure’s supporters hope will lead to a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia argues in the suit that the law violates a woman’s constitutional right to access abortion until about 24 weeks of pregnancy, as established in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in May signed into law House Bill 481, which outlaws most abortions once a doctor can detect fetal cardiac activity — usually at about six weeks of pregnancy and before many women know they are pregnant.
State Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said it is reviewing the complaint and declined to comment on pending litigation. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones.
And in Missouri, an administrative hearing commissioner granted the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis a stay Friday, allowing it to continue to provide abortions while it appeals the state’s decision not to renew its license.
The order by Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi was issued hours before the scheduled expiration of a court order that kept the clinic doors open to abortion patients.
The clinic is the last abortion provider in the state.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services says the basis of its decision to deny the application for license renewal is its inability to interview five physicians who provided treatment at the clinic, according to Dandamudi.
Two of the seven physicians DHSS requested to interview have spoken to the agency. The clinic said it cannot force the other five to submit because they are not employees of the clinic, but are contracted through teaching hospitals and medical schools.