A judge has temporarily blocked Kentucky laws that ban abortion.
Jefferson Circuit Judge Mitch Perry issued a restraining order Thursday morning that allows Kentucky’s two abortion clinics, both in Louisville, to resume offering the procedure, at least until Wednesday, July 6, when he will hear their arguments for a more lasting injunction against the laws.
State Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he would seek relief from the order, but didn’t say what relief he would seek.
Perry’s order blocked the state “trigger law” passed to ban abortions except in cases of threat to the woman’s life upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which occurred a week earlier. He also blocked a six-week ban on abortions in a 2019 law that a federal judge has blocked.
“Kentucky becomes at least the fourth state where a judge has temporarily blocked a state law banning or strictly limiting abortion under a strategy abortion rights advocates are using to challenge such laws based on state constitutional claims,” reports Deborah Yetter of the Courier Journal. “Lawyers for Planned Parenthood and EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the state’s only two abortion providers, were reviewing the one-page order Thursday and Kentucky law before determining when their Louisville clinics might be able to resume providing abortions.”
The Kentucky lawsuit is based on the untested legal theory that the state constitution grants a right to privacy that the laws violate. Cameron told Perry Wednesday, “There is no textual, precedential, or historical support for the argument that there is a right to abortion embedded within the Kentucky Constitution.” He said a ruling supporting the argument “would be directly contradictory to the historical precedent in the commonwealth and to the will of the people as expressed through their duly elected representatives.”
The General Assembly has placed on the Nov. 8 ballot a constitutional amendment saying that the state constitution does not grant a right to abortion or government funding of abortions.
Gov. Andy Beshear, asked what he would do to defeat the amendment, didn’t respond directly but said he would “lend my voice to the overwhelming view of Kentuckians” that abortion bans should have exceptions for cases of rape and incest.
“The law as we had it before [the Supreme Court’s decision] is the type of balance we ought to be looking for,” he said at his regular Thursday afternoon press conference. He also said the trigger law may pose an obstacle to the process of in-vitro fertilization.
The Commonwealth Policy Center’s executive director, Richard Nelson, of Cadiz, issued a statement about the judge’s ruling.
“This is a last-ditch attempt by the ACLU to preserve an egregious wrong that has led to the tragic loss of innocent unborn life in the Commonwealth,” said Nelson.
He noted the ACLU argued that Kentucky’s abortion ban violates the rights of privacy and bodily autonomy. “But what about the body of the unborn child? And what about the rights of that child?” he said. “This kind of judicial activism by a state judge is precisely why Kentucky needs to pass the constitutional amendment that says abortion is not a protected right.”
(Hoptown Chronicle contributed to this report.)
