Here's Rewire, with the precedent:
U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves granted plaintiffsâ temporary restraining order on Tuesday afternoon in a brief two-page order. âThe Supreme Court says every woman has a constitutional right to âpersonal privacyâ regarding her body. That right protects her choice âto have an abortion before viability,ââ Reeves wrote, citing Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
And:
The cases Reeves citedâRoe, Casey, and Hellerstedtâall prohibit a state from interfering with a pregnant personâs right to a pre-viability abortion. Medical consensus is that a fetus is not viable until about 24 weeks. Anti-choice activists have attempted to roll back the point of viability, arguing that some fetuses can survive outside the womb at 22 weeks.
But no fetus is viable at 15 weeks, as the plaintiffs note in their complaint.
âHB 1510 places viability at 15 weeksâabout two months earlier than where the medical consensus places it,â Reeves wrote in his order, noting that the law is of âdubious constitutionality.â
This is good news. The 15-week ban was notable for a number of reasons, but perhaps most damning of all is its failure to include exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the woman, which is a new low for anti-choice policy. Even the Hyde Amendmentâwhich was intentionally passed to curtail low-income women's access to abortionâhas these exceptions.
An abortion at 15 weeks is pre-viability, but if you feel weird about those after 20 weeks (20-week bans are also a popular anti-choice move), allow me to remind you that they're rare, and often happen under heartbreaking circumstances, which are, like all heartbreaking circumstances, unknowable to those who haven't experienced them personally. But now might also be a good time to revisit my post on how the right has co-opted pseudo-scientific language to stigmatize later abortions. Because while many states have done the opposite, it's likely that we'll be seeing more restrictions like Mississippi's elsewhere as the Trump administration carries uselessly on.