The Georgia Supreme Court struck down another attempt by the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other abortion groups to end some protections for innocent preborn babies. The ruling sends the case back to a lower court.
ATLANTA (LifeSiteNews) -- Abortion activists seeking to overturn Georgia's democratically passed law protecting babies from abortion when a heartbeat can be detected suffered another loss in the courts.
The Supreme Court of Georgia voted 6-1 to send the case back to a lower court. The February 20 decision puts the entire case at risk.
The decision followed an unrelated court case concerning third-party standing. That January 28 decision made it harder for third-parties to bring suits – the plaintiffs in this case are not individual women seeking abortions. Rather, the ACLU-backed plaintiffs are abortion facilities, such as Planned Parenthood, and abortionists.
The latest ruling allows Georgia's protections for some babies to remain in place. The state passed the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act in 2019. It went into effect in 2022, the year the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and affirmed there is no federal "right" to abortion.
This is the latest loss not just for the abortion activists, but for Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney.
Judge McBurney wrote an opinion in October that claimed protections for preborn babies turn a woman into an "incubator," although he would have allowed prohibitions on abortions in the third trimester.
Judge McBurney declared last September the LIFE Act was “unconstitutional” because “the liberty of privacy means that [pregnant women] alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to [so-called] viability." The activist judge's decision came despite a ruling the year prior that upheld the law.
Georgia's highest court soon after reversed that decision, allowing the law to remain in place while the case continued.
Activist Judge McBurney will now have to reconsider the case.
The "SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective," a plaintiff in the case, claimed that the latest ruling advances "white supremacy." The group is led by a woman who refers to herself as "a proud, Black Queer Feminist" on the organization's website.
However, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America praised the ruling. "We celebrate that the lifesaving law remains in effect," the group wrote on X.
The bill forbids abortions once a baby's heartbeat can be detected, except in cases of rape, incest, physical "medical emergencies," and pregnancies deemed allegedly “medically futile," as LifeSiteNews previously reported.
Pro-lifers, however, affirm that all human beings are deserving of protection, no matter the circumstances of their conception.
Abortion – the destruction of an unborn child – is never justifiable, nor is it medically necessary to preserve a woman’s life or health, as medical experts have attested.
Pro-life groups and public officials recently submitted amicus briefs to the Georgia Supreme Court, urging it to uphold the law, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.
“The elected representatives of the people of Georgia enacted the LIFE Act, which generally bars providers from performing abortions after the unborn child develops a detectable heartbeat,” an amicus brief from 19 Republican attorneys general states. “That law violates neither Georgia’s right to privacy nor its Equal Protection Clause.”
The brief also addressed the "privacy" claim, focusing on the widespread harm from the destruction of innocent babies.
"Far from a hidden thought whispered in the confines of the home, the effects of abortion ripple throughout society, from the women who endure it, to the medical staff who perform it, to the unborn lives extinguished by it,” the document stated.
