Supreme Court to Hear Kentucky Attorney General’s Last-Minute Attempt to Revive State Abortion Ban
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider whether the Kentucky attorney general may step in to a case at the last minute to attempt to revive an unconstitutional abortion restriction.
The lawsuit concerns the ACLU’s challenge to a Kentucky law that bans a standard abortion procedure. Two lower courts ruled that the Kentucky law, which would prevent some patients from accessing abortion care altogether, is unconstitutional. After the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron filed a motion to intervene in the case in a last-ditch effort to reinstate the abortion ban. The Sixth Circuit ruled that Cameron’s eleventh-hour attempt to jump into the case was untimely. The Supreme Court will now review that decision and decide whether Cameron’s late entry should be permitted.
“This case is only about whether the Attorney General, after having sat on the sidelines of this lawsuit, can jump in at the last minute in an effort to revive an unconstitutional law,” said Andrew Beck, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “The Attorney General has shown that he will stop at nothing to prevent people from making their own decisions about a pregnancy. Major medical associations have condemned harmful restrictions like the one at issue here, and every court to consider a law like this has blocked it. We will continue to work to make sure this ban never takes effect.”
The ACLU, the ACLU of Kentucky, and the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers brought this case on behalf of EMW Women’s Surgical Center, P.S.C., on behalf of the clinic, its staff, and its patients, as well as two physicians who provide care at EMW, on behalf of themselves and their patients.
