Arizona court considers valid 160-year-old law that almost completely bans abortion

Arizona’s highest court ruled on Tuesday, April 9, that an 1864 law banning almost all abortions was compliant. This text prohibits voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is in danger. Rape or incest are not considered valid exceptions. The judges of the Supreme Court ruled that nothing stood in the way of its application since the constitutional protection of abortion was canceled in 2022, making each state autonomous on the subject.

However, Arizona Attorney General, Democrat Kris Mayes, has long warned that she would not initiate any prosecution. If the law should therefore not be applied in practice for the moment, the situation could change depending on the elections, the prosecutors being elected in the United States.

Joe Biden denounces “cruel” law

This decision reinforces the electoral stakes in the run-up to the presidential election, in a key state where Joe Biden won against Donald Trump with only 10,000 votes ahead in 2020. The Republican candidate rightly emphasized on Monday that he wanted to leave a free hand to American states to legislate on abortion, in the event of a return to the White House. Abortion has been a battleground of the conservative movement for several decades, but the cancellation of the federal guarantee of the right to abortion has proven very unpopular with the general American public in several recent elections.

For his part, Joe Biden denounced this legal decision on Tuesday, a law “cruel” according to the Democrat who made the issue of access to abortion a central axis of his campaign for his re-election. Criticizing a ban on abortion “even more extreme and dangerous”the American president believes that the court decision in this western American state is the result of elected Republican officials “who are determined to take away women’s freedom”.