North Dakota Judge Rules Abortion Law Violates State Constitution

South Central District Judge Bruce Romanick listens to arguments by attorneys during a hearing challenging North Dakota's abortion laws in Bismarck, N.D., on July 23, 2024. Brad Nygaard/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, File

North Dakota District Judge Bruce Romanic has struck down the state’s abortion law in a 24-page ruling that said it violated state law because it was too vague.

The judge’s order legalizes abortion in the state, though there are no clinics in operation. The Republican-majority Legislature is expected to appeal the ruling.

Red River Women’s Clinic was previously the state’s only abortion provider before it moved in 2022 from Fargo, North Dakota, to Moorhead, Minnesota.

Tammi Kromenaker, the director of the clinic, said the judge’s ruling “gives us hope” though she has no plans to reopen a clinic in North Dakota.

“We feel like the court heard our concerns and the physicians in North Dakota’s concerns about a law that we felt went too far,” she said. 

The Lawsuit

In 2022, the Red River Women’s Clinic filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s abortion ban, which includes exceptions for preventing severe health complications or death of the woman, and in the case of rape or incest, for up to six weeks of pregnancy.

Romanick was ruling on the state’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, deciding that the North Dakota Constitution protects “inalienable rights.”

“The abortion statutes at issue in this case infringe on a woman’s fundamental right to procreative autonomy, and are not narrowly tailored to promote women’s health or to protect unborn human life,” Romanick wrote in his order. “The law as currently drafted takes away a woman’s liberty and her right to pursue and obtain safety and happiness.”

The judge called the ban “confusing and vague,” with the exceptions of whether a pregnancy was the product of rape or incest “fraught with uncertainty and highly susceptible to being disputed by others.”

“As currently written, physicians are compelled to guess the law’s meaning and application,”Romanick said. “This lack of clarity in the law—forcing physicians to make a medical judgment regarding the factual circumstances of how a patient became pregnant, with no way of reliably or consistently making that determination medically, and charging them with a felony if they get it wrong—simply does not comport with the requirements of due process.”

Romanick also said that in 1889, when the state and its constitution were established, “women were not treated as full and equal citizens,” and that that view shouldn’t be carried into the present.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.