Georgia Judge Overturns Six-Week Abortion Ban, Declaring It Unconstitutional

A Georgia judge ruled on Monday that the state’s six-week abortion ban is unconstitutional and has blocked its enforcement.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney stated that abortions should be regulated as they were before the 2019 law known as the Life Act was enacted. The ban was previously on hold while Roe v. Wade was in effect but took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Prior to that ruling, Georgia allowed abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. With this new decision, abortions beyond six weeks can once again take place in the state.

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McBurney also added how many women aren’t aware that they’re pregnant at six weeks. “For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”

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McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”

Judge McBurney’s ruling comes just weeks after ProPublica revealed that two women in Georgia lost their lives because they couldn’t access legal abortions in the months following the overturning of Roe.