North Dakota Confirms There’s No Right to Kill Babies in Abortions
The North Dakota Supreme Court issued a ruling that restores the state’s near-total abortion ban protecting unborn children and women after a lower court had struck down the law. SB 2150, enacted in 2023 with overwhelming legislative support, bans abortion except in cases of rape or incest prior to six weeks of gestation, and when its “deemed necessary” to preserve the life or health of the mother. The law makes performing an elective abortion a Class C felony carrying a punishment of up to five years in prison with fines of up to $10,000.
In July 2023, a state county district court judge ruled that the abortion ban was “unconstitutionally vague” as to when an abortion could be performed to save the mother’s life. In the North Dakota Supreme Court’s 3-2 decision, three of the Justices agreed with the lower court while only two Justices found the law to be constitutional. In North Dakota, at least four of the five justices must agree that a law violates the state constitution for it to be struck down. Since only three justices sided against it, the lower court ruling is reversed, and the pro-life law is restored.
Please follow LifeNews.com on Gab for the latest pro-life news and info, free from social media censorship.
According to the majority opinion, the “vague” and “unconstitutional” provision of when an abortion may be performed cannot not be severed from the rest of the law, which makes it “invalid in its entirety.” The three Justices also noted that the North Dakota Constitution “guarantees the right to an abortion” under its inalienable rights provision of “enjoying and defending life and liberty” and “pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness.” Yet, abortion is never mentioned in the state constitution, nor has its provisions been commonly interpreted to include abortion since its inception in 1889—136 years ago.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Jerod Tufte, joined by Chief Justice Jon Jensen, wrote that the state constitution did not broadly protect abortion rights.
Justice Tufte noted that North Dakota Constitution limits legislation from infringing on natural and inalienable rights, but only as those rights were understood at the time North Dakotans ratified the constitution.
The “fundamental right” of abortion “was apparently overlooked by every person alive when [the Constitution] was adopted and by almost everyone else in the time since,” wrote Justice Tufte. “The fact that it took more than a century for [the Constitution] to be asserted against any of the statutes criminalizing abortion refutes any notion that the language ‘defending life and liberty’ or ‘pursuing and obtaining safety’ plainly limits state regulation of abortion.”
Regarding vagueness, Justice Tufte stated that the legal challenge to the abortion ban was predicated on “lawyer-crafted hypotheticals” rather than any real situations. Justice Tufte concluded that any disagreement among the testifying medical experts on these hypothetical scenarios was not enough to render the law unconstitutional.
Liberty Counsel’s Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Restoring North Dakota’s duly enacted abortion ban is a victory for life. North Dakota’s pro-life law protects innocent unborn lives and there is nothing unconstitutional about that. Abortion harms women physically and emotionally, and there is no right to cruelly kill defenseless children in the womb.”
Posts
