Lawsuits send warning on abortion bans

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.— Arkansas lawmakers can’t say they weren’t warned.

As the Republican-led Legislature advanced a series of measures earlier this year restricting abortions, opponents repeatedly warned that the moves would prompt the types of legal challenges that have halted or overturned other bans enacted in recent years. Those groups are now following through on that threat, with a pair of lawsuits aimed at blocking five of those new restrictions before they take effect.

The challenges aren’t just intended to overturn restrictions in a state that has turned deeply red in recent years. They’re also meant to send a message to anti-abortion groups who view the solidly Republican legislature as an easy win for new efforts to limit the procedure that can be tested elsewhere.

“Arkansas politicians have passed extreme abortion bans that put their political agenda ahead of women’s health. No more. We’re fighting back,” Talcott Camp, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement announcing the lawsuits.

The ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights are focusing on four new laws approved this year, including a ban on a procedure known as dilation and evacuation. Abortion-rights supporters say it’s the safest and most common procedure used in second-trimester abortions. They’re also challenging a “sex-selection” abortion ban that the groups say would indefinitely delay a woman’s abortion by requiring doctors review her entire pregnancy procedure and a tissue disposal law that they say would effectively require notification of the woman’s sexual partner or parents. The fourth law the group wants to halt expands the requirement that physicians performing abortions for patients under 14 take steps to preserve embryonic or fetal tissue and to notify local police where the minor resides.