After the Arizona Supreme Courtroom allowed for near-total abortion ban, a gaggle of abortion-rights protesters gathered exterior the Arizona state Capitol in Phoenix on April 9, 2024.
Katherine Davis-Younger/KJZZ
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Katherine Davis-Younger/KJZZ
After the Arizona Supreme Courtroom allowed for near-total abortion ban, a gaggle of abortion-rights protesters gathered exterior the Arizona state Capitol in Phoenix on April 9, 2024.
Katherine Davis-Younger/KJZZ
PHOENIX – Abortions will quickly be outlawed in Arizona besides in circumstances the place a pregnant particular person’s life is in danger. The state Supreme Courtroom has dominated Arizona ought to comply with a restrictive abortion legislation courting again to the 1860s.
Since Dec. 2022, Arizona medical doctors have been allowed to supply abortions as much as 15 weeks right into a being pregnant, based mostly on a decrease courtroom’s interpretation of state legal guidelines. However the state Supreme Courtroom now says Arizona ought to comply with a legislation banning abortions in nearly all circumstances. It makes no exceptions for rape or incest and makes performing an abortion punishable by two to 5 years in jail.
Deliberate Parenthood Arizona, the state’s largest abortion supplier, says it plans to proceed offering abortions till the choice is enforced.
Within the ruling, justices wrote that they are going to keep enforcement for 14 days, presumably longer, permitting abortions to proceed throughout that point. Deliberate Parenthood Arizona, the state’s largest abortion supplier, says it plans to proceed offering abortions so long as allowed.
An effort is already underway to place a measure on 2024 ballots that might enshrine abortion rights within the state structure.
Democratic President Joe Biden criticized Arizona’s ban in a press release, calling on Congress to cross federal abortion protections.
“Thousands and thousands of Arizonans will quickly reside underneath an much more excessive and harmful abortion ban, which fails to guard girls even when their well being is in danger or in tragic circumstances of rape or incest,” he stated. “This ruling is a results of the acute agenda of Republican elected officers who’re dedicated to tearing away girls’s freedom.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to journey to Tucson on Friday for an occasion specializing in “reproductive freedom.” It is Harris’ second journey to Arizona this yr to push for increasing abortion entry.
Abortion throughout the nation
The choice comes a bit of greater than every week after the Florida Supreme Courtroom determined to permit that state’s week’s 6-week ban to take impact Might 1, and a day following former President Donald Trump’s announcement that abortion ought to be left as much as the states, angering a few of his supporters forward of 2024 election.
The U.S. Supreme Courtroom reversed Roe v. Wade almost two years in the past and handed abortion choices again to states leading to a patchwork of legal guidelines throughout the nation.
Fourteen states ban abortion with very restricted exceptions, based on the Guttmacher Institute, a gaggle that helps abortion rights. One other 15 states defend abortion rights in varied methods, based on Guttmacher.
This November, there are efforts in a couple of dozen states, together with the one in Arizona, so as to add a query to voters’ ballots supporting abortion rights.
