HIGH COURT WILL HEAR CASE ON ABORTION

The Supreme Court will decide whether Kentucky's Republican attorney general can defend the state's restrictive abortion law against the wishes of its Democratic governor, the justices announced Monday.

The law would effectively ban after 15 weeks a common procedure used to terminate a pregnancy in the second trimester. A trial court struck down the law as unconstitutional and a divided panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.

But the case, which the Supreme Court will hear in the term that begins in the fall, does not ask the court to reconsider its abortion jurisprudence.

The question instead is whether the appeals court was right to bar Attorney General Daniel Cameron from taking over the case to further challenge the ruling. Health and Family Services Secretary Eric Friedlander, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, decided against further defense of the law.

The law was passed in 2018 by Kentucky's majority Republican Legislature and signed by the state's governor at the time, who was a Republican.

“I promised Kentuckians that I would defend our laws all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and that's what we've done,” Cameron said in a statement.

“Since day one in office, we've fought to defend House Bill 454, even when the Beshear administration refused to defend it. This law reflects the conscience of Kentucky.”

Beshear, who as the state's attorney general until 2019 had said he would not pursue additional defense of the law, said during his gubernatorial campaign that he would not defend abortion laws he considered unconstitutional.

The Kentucky case is Cameron v. EMW Women's Surgical Center.