In a huge victory for reproductive rights advocates, a Georgia judge struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban on Monday, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced. Abortions are now legal in Georgia up until about 22 weeks of pregnancy.
Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney ruled in a 26-page decision that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was federal law but went into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.
Judge McBurney echoed the words of so many healthcare providers when he said in his ruling that most women don't even know they're pregnant at six weeks.
And Judge McBurney also invoked Margaret Atwood.
“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.”
In a footnote, McBurney added: “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.”