By JACQUES BILLEAUD and MORGAN LEE Associated Press
PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court has delivered a landmark decision in giving the go-ahead to enforce a long-dormant law that bans nearly all abortions, drastically altering the legal landscape for terminating pregnancies in the state.
The law predating Arizona’s statehood provides no exceptions for rape or incest and allows abortions only if the mother’s life is in jeopardy. Arizona’s highest court suggested doctors can be prosecuted under the 1864 law, though the opinion written by the court’s majority didn’t explicitly say that.
The Tuesday decision threw out an earlier lower-court decision that concluded doctors couldn’t be charged for performing abortions in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
HOW WE GOT HERE
The law was enacted decades before Arizona became a state on Feb. 14, 1912. A court in Tucson had blocked its enforcement shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing the constitutional right to an abortion.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe decision in June 2022, then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, successfully requested that a state judge lift an injunction that blocked enforcement of the 1864 ban.
The state Court of Appeals suspended the law as Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, urged the state’s high court to uphold the appellate court’s decision.
WHO CAN BE PROSECUTED UNDER THE 1864 LAW?
The law orders prosecution for “a person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life.”
The Arizona Supreme Court suggested in its ruling Tuesday that physicians can be prosecuted, though justices didn’t say that…
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