Arizona's top court revives 19th century abortion ban
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled 4-2 in favor of an anti-abortion obstetrician and a county prosecutor who pressed to implement the Civil War-era statute after the Democratic attorney general of the key presidential battleground state declined to do so.
States were given the go-ahead to adopt such bans after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned its landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade that had made access to abortion a constitutional right nationwide.
Arizona Justice John Lopez, who like all of the state Supreme Court's members was appointed by a Republican governor, wrote that the state's legislature «has never affirmatively created a right to, or independently authorized, elective abortion.»
«We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature's judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens,» Lopez wrote.
The state high court ruled the 19th century law could be enforced prospectively. But it stayed implementation of its decision for 14 days to allow the parties to raise any remaining issues at the trial-court level.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, in a statement called the ruling «unconscionable and an affront to freedom,» and stressed that she would not prosecute any doctor or woman under the «draconian law.»
«Today's decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn't a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn't even vote
