ATLANTA — A Fulton County Superior Court judge on Monday ruled struck down Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.
Judge Robert C.I. McBurney enjoined H.B. 481, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act, which lawmakers passed in 2019. It effectively bans most abortions starting after roughly six weeks.
The ruling comes after the Georgia Supreme Court issued a decision in this case in October 2023 addressing a different question: whether H.B. 481 was void from the start under a special provision of the Georgia Constitution because it violated the federal Constitution at the time of its enactment in 2019 when Roe v. Wade was in place.
Holding that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overruling Roe effectively erased from history the half-century of federal constitutional decisions protecting a fundamental right to abortion, the Georgia Supreme Court allowed H.B. 481 to remain in place. The Supreme Court then sent the case back to the trial court to rule in the first instance on the plaintiffs’ other claims that the ban violates the Georgia Constitution’s rights to privacy and equal protection.
In addition to striking down the six-week abortion ban, the decision finds that another provision of the law giving district attorneys broad access to the medical records of abortion patients is a violation of Georgians’ constitutional right to privacy.