A federal judge on July 11 temporarily blocked Arizona’s “personhood” law, which recognizes that human life begins at conception, preventing it from being used to take legal action against abortion providers.
The legal drama comes as states across the nation, including Arizona, are trying to adjust in light of the Supreme Court’s June 24 decision that there’s no right to an abortion to be found in the U.S. Constitution, sending the regulation of abortion back to the states.
Attorney Jessica Sklarsky, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights who argued the case, told The Associated Press that the federal district court “made the right decision today by blocking this law from being used to create an unthinkably extreme abortion ban.”
“The Supreme Court’s catastrophic decision overturning Roe v. Wade has unleashed chaos on the ground, leaving Arizona residents scrambling to figure out if they can get the abortion care they need,” Sklarsky said.
Brittni Thomason, a spokesperson for the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said the state is centered on “bringing clarity to the law for Arizonans.”
“Today’s ruling was based on an interpretation of Arizona law that our office did not agree with, and we are carefully considering our next steps,” Thomason told the media outlet.
Same Constitutional Rights
The Arizona law at issue, enacted in April 2021, isn’t specifically about abortion. The personhood statute declared that the laws of the state “shall be interpreted” to protect unborn children “at every stage of the development,” acknowledging that they possess all the same constitutional rights as human beings who have been born. The Arizona law is similar to laws in Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, and Missouri.The Arizona statute doesn’t cover individuals who perform in vitro fertilization and women who indirectly harm their unborn children by not taking proper care of themselves.
The same federal judge refused to put the personhood law on pause last year, but abortion groups reapplied for an injunction after the Supreme Court ruling.
Arizona argued that the state should be allowed to enforce the law. In a brief filed with the federal district court on July 1, the state argued that the proposed injunction should be denied because the challengers hadn’t demonstrated that they'll suffer irreparable harm from enforcement of the statute, noting that the court had previously concluded that the “vagueness challenge” brought by the plaintiffs “fails as a matter of law” and that therefore their rights hadn’t been violated.
The challengers said the law was overly vague. How the statute might be applied “is anyone’s guess,” the abortion providers said in court. They argued that the statute burdens the rights of women to terminate pregnancies before fetal viability, at least as those rights stood before the Supreme Court ruling, and abridged the freedom of speech between doctor and patient.
“It is about giving people fair notice of what the law means so that they know in advance how to comply,” Rayes wrote.
The law is vague and makes it impossible for the medical doctors challenging it to do their work, the judge said. The court declined to express a view at this time “on whether a law defining ‘person’ to include the unborn for all purposes and without exception would be constitutional.”
The lawsuit, Isaacson v. Brnovich, is still before the U.S. District Court in Arizona.
Rayes issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the state from enforcing the law “as applied to abortion care that is otherwise permissible under Arizona law” while the case remains pending. The state was also enjoined from retroactively enforcing the law “against those who performed otherwise lawful abortions during the time that this preliminary injunction is in effect.”
