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Kentucky Supreme Court docket Justice Lisabeth Hughes and Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. hear throughout oral arguments in November 2022 over the state’s two abortion bans.
Timothy D. Easley/AP
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Timothy D. Easley/AP
Kentucky Supreme Court docket Justice Lisabeth Hughes and Chief Justice John D. Minton Jr. hear throughout oral arguments in November 2022 over the state’s two abortion bans.
Timothy D. Easley/AP
The Kentucky Supreme Court docket has dominated the state’s near-total bans on abortion will stay in place whereas a lawsuit over the matter continues. The bans embrace a six-week ban and a set off regulation, which have been in place since August of final yr.
The resolution has been carefully watched because it comes simply months after voters weighed in on the difficulty of abortion rights and signaled help for abortion rights on the poll field.
The 2 state legal guidelines – a ban on almost all abortions in Kentucky and a ban on most abortions after about six weeks of being pregnant – had been allowed to take impact final yr following the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s Dobbs v. Jackson Girls’s Well being Group resolution.
Each legal guidelines had been handed in 2019, as a part of a years-long effort by largely Republican lawmakers in a number of states to limit the process as a lot as doable. They put in place layers of restrictions that might take impact within the occasion that Roe v. Wade was both partially or, as in Dobbs, totally overturned.
Kentucky’s two remaining clinics, Deliberate Parenthood and EMW Girls’s Surgical Heart, had been compelled to cease offering abortions in early August. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged each bans, prompting a sequence of litigation that culminated with arguments earlier than the Kentucky Supreme Court docket in November.
The oral arguments earlier than the Supreme Court docket of Kentucky came about simply days after voters rejected Modification 2, which might have amended the state structure to state explicitly that there isn’t any proper to an abortion.
Kentucky Legal professional Common Daniel Cameron, a Republican, defended the 2 legal guidelines, arguing that the state legislature — not the courts — has the suitable to control abortion. The ACLU argued that the legal guidelines violate a number of rights assured by Kentucky’s state Structure, amongst them the “proper of looking for and pursuing their security and happiness” and freedom from “absolute and arbitrary energy.”
As Louisville Public Radio has reported, the state’s seven-person excessive court docket now has a brand new chief justice and two new members, including to the uncertainty round how the newly constituted court docket would possibly rule.
After the Dobbs resolution, abortion rights teams in a number of states with pre-existing abortion bans generally known as “set off legal guidelines” filed lawsuits difficult them in state court docket. In Louisiana, for instance, reproductive rights attorneys persuaded a decide to dam abortion restrictions, profitable clinics within the state a short-term reprieve earlier than a state decide in the end allowed them take impact, prohibiting almost all abortions.
A couple of dozen states have banned most or all abortions, in accordance with knowledge stored by the Heart for Reproductive Rights; legal guidelines in a number of different states together with Ohio and Indiana are tied up in ongoing litigation.
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