State of Georgia | Judge overturns ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy

(Washington) A judge in the US state of Georgia on Monday overturned a law banning abortion beyond six weeks, restoring the previous limit of fetal viability, on the grounds that it violated women’s fundamental rights.

The debate on the limits of the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy (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 the 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 on having, through his appointments of three conservative judges to the Supreme Court of the United States when he was president, led to the June 2022 decision canceling the federal guarantee of the right to abortion.

Through this reversal of half a century of jurisprudence, the 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, i.e. the period at which a first can be detected. cardiac activity, previously inapplicable.

In Monday’s ruling, Judge Robert McBurney said the Georgia Constitution guarantees “a woman’s power to control her own body” but that power is “not unlimited.”

“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume the welfare and responsibility for this separate life, then, and only then, can society intervene,” he said. appreciated.

Denouncing “an arbitrary ban on terminations of pregnancies at six weeks”, a threshold where “many women are completely unaware of being pregnant or at best are not sure”, the judge restores the authorization of abortion until the life of the fetus, around 20 to 22 weeks.

The Center for Reproductive Rights and the influential civil rights organization ACLU welcomed the move in a statement, but stressed that Georgia authorities could “choose to block it by reinstating the ban in the coming days.”