judge overturns abortion ban after six weeks in Georgia

The decision will relaunch the debate on the limits to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy. A judge in the US state of Georgia on Monday, October 1, overturned a law prohibiting abortion beyond six weeks, restoring the previous limit of fetal viability, on the grounds that it violated the fundamental rights of women. The right to abortion is at the heart of the American electoral campaign.

The media ProPublica reported two weeks ago on the death of a 28-year-old woman in a hospital in Georgia in August 2022, attributing it to a lack of care caused by restrictive abortion laws in that state. Vice-president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris deplored the death of Amber Thurman, incriminating the rollback of women’s rights orchestrated by her Republican opponent Donald Trump.

The latter prides himself, with his appointments of three conservative judges to the Supreme Court of the United States when he was president, of having allowed the June 2022 decision canceling the federal guarantee of the right to abortion. Through this reversal of half a century of jurisprudence, the American Supreme Court has given states full latitude to legislate in this area. In Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp was able to bring into force in July 2022 the provisions of a 2019 law prohibiting, with rare exceptions, abortion beyond six weeks.

In his ruling Monday, Justice Robert McBurney says the Georgia Constitution guarantees “the power of a woman to control her own body”but that this power is not “not unlimited”. Denouncing “an arbitrary ban on terminations of pregnancies at six weeks”a threshold where “many women are completely unaware that they are pregnant or at best are unsure”the judge restores the authorization of abortion until the viability of the fetus, i.e. around 20 to 22 weeks.