Justices won’t let North Dakota enforce tough abortion law

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed Hovland’s ruling in July, based on Supreme Court precedent. The Center for Reproductive Rights and Thomas A. Dickson of the Dickson Law Office in Bismarck filed the lawsuit in June 2013 challenging the ban on behalf of Red River Women’s Clinic-the state’s sole abortion provider.

The measure banned abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detected in the fetus – as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear the state’s appeal, just a week after rejecting Arkansas’s appeal of their similar strict anti-abortion law. That ban, which outlawed abortion after 12 weeks, was also struck down in court previous year.

The attorney general’s office has spent more than $320,000 on abortion-related litigation since February 2012, including about $240,000 defending the fetal heartbeat law in federal court, Stenehjem said.

The justices turned away the state’s appeal of decisions striking down the 2013 fetal heartbeat law as unconstitutional.

In November, the Supreme Court said it would hear a challenge to “a 2013 Texas law that has already forced the closure of more than half of the state’s 40 clinics that perform abortions”, as Laura Wagner reported for the Two-Way. The current framework “discounts the legislative branch’s recognized interest in protecting unborn children”, Judge Bobby Shepherd wrote for the panel, which included Judges William Benton and Lavenski Smith. “This utterly cruel and unconstitutional ban would have made North Dakota the first state since Roe v. Wade to effectively ban abortion-with countless women left to pay the price”.

At issue is HB 1456, signed into law by Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple in March 2013.

But, while Texas law is still unsettled, at least Arkansas and North Dakota restrictions have been shut down. Records obtained by The Associated Press show the state had used $320,029 to defend the abortion laws as of December, most of which was spent on the fetal heartbeat measure.

“We continue to look to the nation’s highest court to protect the rights, health, and dignity of millions of women and now strike down Texas’ clinic shutdown law”. The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied the state’s petition to review the law, so it remains blocked.