A U.S. judge has found that part of a new North Carolina law requiring abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy be performed in hospitals is constitutional, ruling against Planned Parenthood.
The judge also struck down another provision in the law, which mandates that medical providers document the existence of a pregnancy before an abortion.
The North Carolina law in question, 2023-14, bans abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy except in cases of medical emergency, rape, incest, or “life-limiting disorder” in an unborn child. Doctors violating the law could be prosecuted with a felony and face a fine of up to $250,000.
The law also contains other provisions, including requiring abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy be performed in hospitals while abortions before 12 weeks could be performed in surgical facilities or abortion clinics in addition to hospitals.
Planned Parenthood and a North Carolina doctor brought the lawsuit in 2023, arguing that parts of it were unconstitutional or unintelligible.
“Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is no fundamental right to abortion,” the judge said, meaning state lawmakers “need only offer rational speculation for its legislative decisions regulating abortion.”
The lawmakers have met that burden, and plaintiffs “have not negated every conceivable basis the General Assembly may have had for enacting the hospitalization requirement,” she added.
State legislators in a brief to the court had said the hospitalization requirement was constitutional because it was “rationally related to the state’s legitimate interest in women’s health and safety.”
The judge noted that abortions sometimes carry complications that require, when performed at non-hospital locations, women to be transferred to hospitals. That means the hospitalization requirement “arguably reduces maternal health risk for abortion patients who experience major complications because they will already be in a hospital and not require transferring,” she said.
The ruling also struck down the provision that requires doctors, before providing abortion-inducing drugs, to document the existence of a pregnancy as well as the probable gestational age.
The provision is unconstitutionally vague in part because it’s unclear whether the word “probable” refers to only gestational age or whether it modifies both the gestational age and the existence of a pregnancy, the judge said.
The vagueness could lead to “arbitrary and uneven enforcement,” particularly because law enforcement officials “may not be familiar with the medical community’s understanding of the term ‘probable intrauterine pregnancy,’” the judge added.
There is a “real possibility that law enforcement officers and prosecutors could reasonably read the Abortion Law as authorizing criminal charges against a doctor who provides a medical abortion without the requisite degree of certainty, whatever that degree is, over whether there is the existence or probable existence of an intrauterine pregnancy,” she wrote later.
The judge previously let the law take effect but entered a preliminary injunction against the hospitalization and documentation requirements while she considered a final ruling.
