On Thursday Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge’s office appealed to the Eighth Circuit in a lawsuit over whether or not the state can prohibit abortions.
Act 309 of 2021 generally prohibits abortion in Arkansas except in cases when the mother’s life is in jeopardy. It is a good law that passed with overwhelming support from the state legislature earlier this year, and it was slated to take effect on July 28.
However, the ACLU filed a lawsuit over Act 309, and U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker blocked the law just days before it was set to take effect.
Now the attorney general is going to ask the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to unblock the law.
A schedule produced by the Eighth Circuit indicates that the court will accept briefings in the case from the A.G.’s team and the ACLU throughout late September, October, and a good portion of November.
At this time we do not know when the court might issue a decision in the case.
Last June the A.G.’s team argued that pro-abortion rulings like Planned Parenthood v. Casey need to be reevaluated and overturned — and that the U.S. Supreme Court is liable to do that in its upcoming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case out of Mississippi.
The A.G. also argued that past pro-abortion decisions like Roe v. Wade “were wrongly decided” and that “there is no doubt that the fetus is a human life — not mere tissue, not ‘potential life,’ and not ‘the product of conception.'”
The attorney general’s decision to appeal this lawsuit will give our federal courts an opportunity to reverse decades of bad case law on abortion.
That means there is potential for some landmark, pro-life victories down the road. Those victories could help stop abortion in Arkansas and elsewhere across the nation.
Photo Credit: American Life League, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr.com. No changes were made to the image.
