An Ohio judge has decided that the state’s ban on most abortions was unconstitutional and could not be enforced.
Judge Christian Jenkins of the Hamilton county common pleas court also granted a permanent injunction in his ruling on Thursday.
Jenkins said that Ohio’s abortion prohibition flouted language in a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution that protected reproductive healthcare.
“Ohio voters have spoken. The Ohio constitution now unequivocally protects the right to abortion,” Jenkins said in his ruling.
Jenkins’s decision stems from a law that prohibited doctors from performing abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac or embryonic activity. This activity can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
While Republican lawmakers in Ohio passed this law in 2019, the legislation did not go into effect until June 2022 – when the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
Jenkins temporarily paused the law less than three months after it went into effect. Healthcare providers in Ohio filed suit to permanently end the legislation, as it drove patients to seek reproductive care outside of the state and imperiled several clinics.
A young girl who was sexual assaulted in Columbus, Ohio, even had to travel to Indiana for abortion care, spurring still more anger over the measure.
Advocates launched a ballot initiative to ensure that reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion, were protected by the state constitution. This campaign passed in November last year, winning 57% of voting Ohioans’ support, the newspaper said.
“This is a momentous ruling, showing the power of Ohio’s new Reproductive Freedom Amendment in practice,” Jessie Hill, cooperating attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said. “The six-week ban is blatantly unconstitutional and has no place in our law.”
Jenkins’ ruling came several months after another Ohio judge temporarily paused a handful of state laws that instituted a mandatory 24-hour waiting period for receiving an abortion.
David C Young, the Franklin county common pleas judge who made this ruling in August, also said that the state constitutional amendment language protecting abortion was “clear and unambiguous.”
Young ruled that lawyers for Preterm Cleveland and healthcare providers who had sued clearly demonstrated “that the challenged statutes burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, and discriminate against patients in exercising their right to an abortion and providers for assisting them in exercising that right”.
The state’s attorney general said he will appeal Young’s ruling.
Jenkins’ decision comes less than two weeks before the presidential election. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has made reproductive rights a key component of her campaign.
Harris has repeatedly pointed out that Donald Trump appointed three supreme court justices who voted to Roe v Wade. The former US president, who took credit for overturning Roe v Wade but recently toned down his language amid backlash, continues to poll far lower with women voters.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
