North Dakota’s near-total abortion ban still will not be enforced until a final decision is reached about its constitutionality, the North Dakota Supreme Court decided on Friday.
BISMARCK (LifeSiteNews) -- North Dakota’s near-total abortion ban still will not be enforced until a final decision is reached about its constitutionality, the North Dakota Supreme Court decided on Friday.
In April 2023, former Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed a law banning most abortions throughout pregnancy, with exceptions only allowed for rape or incest prior to the detection of a heartbeat or when allegedly "necessary" to avoid a “serious health risk” to the mother at any point before or after six weeks. The bill was meant to deal with a block the state’s highest court had placed on North Dakota’s previous abortion law, a trigger law meant to make most abortions illegal on the event of Roe v. Wade’s downfall.
Abortion, which destroys an innocent unborn child, is always gravely immoral and is never needed or justifiable for purported reasons of “health.”
However, District Judge Bruce Romanick blocked the more recent law in September, supposedly for being “unconstitutionally void for vagueness,” and a month later rejected a request to let the law be enforced pending appeal to the state Supreme Court.
On Friday, the justices rejected the state’s request to lift the block on enforcement, the Associated Press reports. “The upshot of the State’s argument is that any decision that recognizes a previously unobserved constitutional right should warrant a stay,” said Justice Daniel Crothers. “We reject the request to adopt such a tenuous connection between the proposition advanced by the State and our precedent.”
“This is only a decision on the stay motion, not on the constitutional merits of the legislation,” responded North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley. “North Dakota will continue moving forward to fully litigate this matter before the state Supreme Court, where we intend to establish that the law passed by our legislature is clearly constitutional.”
The decision technically means that abortion is legal up until fetal viability in North Dakota, but as a practical matter there are no standalone abortion centers to obtain one in the state. The plaintiff in this case, Red River Women’s Clinic, has since relocated to the Minnesota side of the state border.
Thirteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents via deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
