Arizona's top court revives 19th century abortion ban
Arizona’s top court on Tuesday revived a ban on nearly all abortions under a law from 1864, a half century before statehood and women’s suffrage, further restricting reproductive rights in a state where terminating a pregnancy was already barred at 15 weeks of gestation.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled, opens new tab 4-2 in favor of an anti-abortion obstetrician and a county prosecutor who pressed to implement the Civil War-era statute after the Democratic attorney general of the key presidential battleground state declined to do so.
States were given the go-ahead to adopt such bans after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court in June 2022 overturned its landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade that had made access to abortion a constitutional right nationwide.
Arizona Justice John Lopez, who like all of the state Supreme Court’s members was appointed by a Republican governor, wrote that the state’s legislature “has never affirmatively created a right to, or independently authorized, elective abortion.”
