A judge vacated North Dakota’s abortion ban in a Thursday ruling, finding the law unconstitutionally vague and an infringement on medical freedom.
South Central Judicial District Court Judge Bruce Romanick’s order came as part of a lawsuit challenging the law brought by reproductive health care doctors and an abortion clinic last year.
Romanick’s ruling declared the law “unconstitutionally void for vagueness” and found that “pregnant women in North Dakota have a fundamental right to choose abortion before viability exists.”
The ban, enacted by the Legislature in 2023, makes abortion illegal in all cases except rape or incest if the mother has been pregnant for less than six weeks, or when the pregnancy poses a serious physical health threat.
The plaintiffs, which include reproductive health care doctors and the Moorhead, Minnesota-based Red River Women’s Clinic, said in their complaint the law not only infringes on individual rights, but also puts health care providers in danger by not specifying when an abortion could be performed for health reasons.
Attorneys for the state have previously argued that the law is not unlawfully vague and was written with extensive input from North Dakota’s medical community — including some of the plaintiffs.
Tammi Kromenaker, director of the Red River Women’s Clinic, said Thursday’s decision gives her hope.
“I feel like the court heard us when we raised our voices against a law that not only ran counter to our state constitution, but was too vague for physicians to interpret and which prevented them from providing the high quality care that our communities are entitled to,” Kromenaker said.
The clinic had been North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic but moved from Fargo to Minnesota after a prior abortion ban went into effect.
The ban, which was adopted with overwhelming support by both chambers of the Republican-dominated Legislature, established penalties of up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $10,000 fine for any health care professionals found in violation of the law.
The North Dakota Supreme Court last year struck down a similar abortion law adopted by lawmakers in 2007.
That law, often referred to as a “trigger ban,” went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the federal right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade.
The state is expected to appeal Thursday’s decision.
State Sen. Janne Myrdal, R-Edinburg, who sponsored the 2023 bill that created the ban, blasted the judge’s ruling Thursday. She said lawmakers had worked to fix legal issues the North Dakota Supreme Court had identified in the trigger ban.
North Dakota’s Legislature meets again in 2025 but Myrdal said the focus should be on defending the law that was passed in 2023.
“The losers today are the unborn children and their moms and dads, not any activists. There’s no winner in this,” she said.
Romanick announced earlier this year he would retire and not seek reelection in November. The former Burleigh County prosecutor was first elected in 2000 and reelected in 2012 and 2018.
“Judge Romanick will go into his retirement after a long career having made the wrong decision on the most important case he’s ever had,” Myrdal told the North Dakota Monitor.
Meanwhile, North Dakota’s Democratic-NPL Party called the ruling a “victory for women’s reproductive rights.”
“North Dakotans deserve the freedom to make deeply personal health care decisions without interference from government extremists,” Rep. Karla Rose Hanson, D-Fargo, said in a statement. “This law was especially cruel for victims of sexual violence — providing a rape and incest exception but only within six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant.
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This article first appeared in the North Dakota Monitor, a sister site of the Nebraska Examiner in the States Newsroom network.
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Publish date : 2024-09-12 07:41:00
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