The legal complaint claimed the bill was unconstitutional.
Just a day after Mississippi enacted the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban, a federal judge granted the state’s only abortion clinic’s request for a temporary restraining order.
In court papers, the clinic — Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization — cited a woman scheduled for an abortion Tuesday afternoon. She was at 15 weeks or more of gestation which, according to the Associated Press, exceeded the time frame during which Mississippi’s new law permitted certain abortions.
The bill, titled the Gestational Age Act, penalizes doctors who perform post-15 weeks abortions and only includes exceptions for medical emergencies or a “severe fetal abnormality.”
The legal complaint claimed the bill was unconstitutional and cited Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that invalidated certain state laws prohibiting abortion.
Paul Barnes, a special assistant to the attorney general, said that as gestational age increases so does the risk to women.
« Abortions being performed at 12,13,14,15, each of those weeks, the risk goes up,” Barnes argued.
“That is one of the harms this bill is designed to protect…risk increases exponentially from one week to the next,” he added.
He also argued that gestational age emboldens the state’s interest in “protecting unborn life.”
Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant hailed the bill as a way to ensure safety for unborn children:
I was proud to sign House Bill 1510 this afternoon. I am committed to making Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child, and this bill will help us achieve that goal. pic.twitter.com/O0O4QeILLx
— Phil Bryant (@PhilBryantMS) March 19,2018
Bryant seemed to predict Tuesday’s lawsuit, saying “We’ll probably be sued here in about a half hour, and that’ll be fine with me.”
“It is worth fighting over,” he said on Monday.
Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, panned the law as “unconstitutional.”
“This ban is not only unconstitutional — it endangers women’s health care across our state,” Felecia Brown-Williams, an official for Planned Parenthood Southeast, said.
“If legislators truly cared about women’s health, they would be focused on ways to improve access to health care for women, not restrict it,” Brown-Williams added.
Mississippi passed the law after the U. S. Senate rejected a measure that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks.
The temporary block came as the U. S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a case questioning whether pregnancy centers should inform clients of available abortion procedures.
